- UK release: March 2023
- Directors: Jonathan Goldstein · John Francis Daley
- Writers: Jonathan Goldstein, John Francis Daley, Michael Gilio
- Studio / distributor: Paramount Pictures; eOne · Source: the Dungeons & Dragons game
- Genre: Fantasy adventure comedy / heist · Runtime: 134 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- Main cast: Chris Pine (Star Trek, Hell or High Water) as Edgin Darvis; Michelle Rodriguez (The Fast and the Furious, Avatar) as Holga Kilgore; Regé-Jean Page (Bridgerton) as Xenk Yendar; Justice Smith (Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, Detective Pikachu) as Simon Aumar; Sophia Lillis (It) as Doric; Hugh Grant (Four Weddings and a Funeral, Paddington 2) as Forge Fitzwilliam
- IMDb: 7.2 / 10 · Rotten Tomatoes: 91% critics / 92% audience · My rating: 8 / 10
The brand is older than most of the people now buying tickets for it, and the previous attempts to film it are a cautionary tale all on their own. The 2000 picture is the sort of thing people bring up only to laugh at, and the two that followed went quietly to television and stayed there. So a new Dungeons & Dragons film arrives carrying a faint air of dread, the worry being that a game built entirely out of a group of friends improvising round a table is the last thing that should be flattened into a single fixed story. Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley, who wrote Spider-Man: Homecoming and directed the sharp little comedy Game Night, have done the one sensible thing nobody managed before. They have made a film that plays like a good campaign rather than a solemn lore deposit.
The setup
Edgin (Chris Pine) is a bard turned thief, less a musician than a fast-talking planner, sprung from a prison colony alongside his barbarian partner Holga (Michelle Rodriguez). His old crew has scattered, his daughter is in the keeping of a former associate who has done very well for himself, and a relic that might put right an old loss is locked away behind people far more dangerous than either of them. To get any of it back, Edgin reassembles a band of the not-quite-competent: an anxious sorcerer who cannot trust his own talent, a shapeshifting druid with little patience for human nonsense, and, eventually, a paladin so upright he is almost a punchline. The plan, as plans of this kind must, goes wrong in instructive ways.
It is a heist film wearing a fantasy costume, and the structure does it a favour. Rather than marching through a map, the film keeps setting its characters a problem, watching them improvise a ramshackle solution, and letting the solution collapse into the next problem. That is what a night at the table actually feels like, and the film knows it.
The cast
Pine is the engine here, and he plays Edgin with a self-deprecating charm that never tips into smugness. He is happy to be the man whose schemes fail, and the willingness to look foolish is what makes him good company for two hours. Rodriguez gives Holga a deadpan physical certainty that works as the straight line to Pine’s patter; the two of them carry a worn-in friendship that the script is wise enough to keep platonic. Justice Smith makes the insecure sorcerer Simon genuinely sympathetic rather than merely twitchy, and Sophia Lillis brings a flat, unimpressed cool to Doric that the film could have used more of.
Regé-Jean Page turns up as the noble paladin Xenk and walks off with every scene he is in by playing complete sincerity entirely straight, the joke being that nobody around him can cope with a person this honest. And Hugh Grant, as the smiling rogue Forge, does the late-career cad routine he has refined into an art, a man you would shake hands with knowing full well he had already taken your watch.
The craft
Goldstein and Daley direct with a light touch and a comic’s sense of timing, and the film is at its best when an action sequence and a gag are the same thing. A graveyard interrogation, conducted on corpses with a strict and rapidly expiring limit on questions, is the standout, a set piece built on a rule rather than on spectacle. The creature work is generous and practical-feeling, an enormous reluctant dragon and a shapeshifter’s menagerie among them, and the world has a lived-in, slightly shabby texture that suits the tone. Lorne Balfe’s score knows when to swell and when to get out of the way. At 134 minutes it sags a little in the middle stretch, and a couple of the digital vistas are more functional than memorable, but the pacing mostly keeps its feet.
How it stacks up
The obvious touchstone is Guardians of the Galaxy: the same bickering misfit crew, the same trick of undercutting its own grand moments before they curdle. It also owes a clear debt to The Princess Bride, sharing that film’s affection for adventure and its refusal to take itself seriously, though it never quite reaches that level of wit. Against the cheerfully daft The Mummy of 1999 it holds up well, trading some of that film’s pulpy momentum for warmer characters. What it manages, and what the earlier Dungeons & Dragons films never did, is to translate the actual texture of the game, the improvisation, the failed rolls, the party arguing over a plan, into something a newcomer can enjoy without ever having held a twenty-sided die.
Critics versus the rest of us
For once critics and audiences are in cheerful agreement. The reviews are running around 91%, audiences a notch higher at 92%, and the praise lands on the same things: the humour, the warmth, the chemistry of the cast, the relief of a fantasy film that is not grinding through mythology with a straight face. The IMDb score sits more modestly at 7.2, which feels about right for a film nobody is calling a masterpiece and almost everybody seems to have enjoyed. There is no real critical war to report, only a pleasant surprise that a Hasbro property turned out to have a soul.
Verdict
What lifts this above a competent franchise launch is how much fun it is to be in its company, and how plainly it would reward a second visit. It is funny without being exhausting, sincere without being earnest, and built around a crew you would happily follow on another job. The middle drags, the plot is mechanical when you stand back from it, and it is not trying to reinvent the genre. None of that dents the basic pleasure of the thing. It is warm, quick, properly entertaining, and the rare adaptation that honours its source by catching its spirit rather than cataloguing its rules. 8⁄10.
Availability: On general release in UK cinemas now, including IMAX. A digital and disc release will follow in the usual window.
Update
Added since this review first appeared: the film performed respectably rather than spectacularly at the box office, enough to leave a sequel in limbo for a while rather than greenlit on the spot. It has since settled into a reputation as comfortably the best Dungeons & Dragons film and one of the better game-to-screen adaptations full stop, the sort of title people recommend with mild surprise that it is as good as it is. It is now on digital and 4K disc and streams on Paramount+ depending on region.
BBFC content advice
Rated 12A by the BBFC for moderate violence, threat, horror, language. The notes below may contain spoilers.
Violence: Scenes include battles involving bladed weapons, projectiles, magical powers, and hand-to-hand combat. In a battle scene a man is cut in half, but the moment is brief and undetailed.
Threat and horror: There are sequences of threat in which people are held captive, threatened with knives, or pursued by creatures - including a dragon. There are also moments of horror involving magical beings performing spells, jump scares involving demonic entities, and an extended comic sequence in which corpses - some of which display gruesome injuries - are briefly reanimated.
Language: There is use of moderate bad language (‘prick’) and milder terms including ‘ass’, ‘shit’, ‘son of a bitch’, ‘bastard’, ‘bloody’, ‘bollocks’, ‘God’, ‘damn’ and ‘hell’.
Rude humour: There is occasional rude humour.
Theme: Characters grieve lost loved ones.
Flashing/flickering lights: This work contains flashing images which may affect viewers who are susceptible to photosensitive epilepsy.
Source: British Board of Film Classification (bbfc.co.uk).
