Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves Review: A Great Hang, Not a Great Fantasy Film
Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves does not sell you a rulebook. It sells you a bard, a barbarian and a stolen tablet. Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley directed and co-wrote the film, which opened in the United States on March 31, 2023, after a world premiere at South by Southwest on March 10. It runs 134 minutes. It is an adventure, a fantasy and a comedy, and it is the rare adaptation that treats a game’s rules as a set of props rather than a test.
Chris Pine plays Edgin “Ed” Darvis, a bard and former Harper. Michelle Rodriguez plays Holga Kilgore, a barbarian banished from the Uthgardt Elk Tribe for marrying an outsider. They are the engine.
Trailer, via Paramount Pictures.
A Bard, a Barbarian and a Very Long Prison Break
The setup is a heist gone wrong. Ed tried to steal a “Tablet of Reawakening” from a Harper stronghold to resurrect his wife, who was killed by disciples of a Red Wizard he had arrested. He and Holga were caught. Their accomplices got away. After two years’ imprisonment in frozen Revel’s End, they escape and reach Neverwinter, where Forge Fitzwilliam (Hugh Grant) has become Lord.
Forge has been taking care of Ed’s daughter Kira, played by Chloe Coleman. Kira is 14. Forge convinced her that Ed’s greed led to his arrest. That is the wound the film keeps pressing, and it is the one thread that gives the comedy a spine.
The crew fills out fast:
- Justice Smith as Simon Aumar, a half-elf wild magic sorcerer descended from Elminster Aumar
- Sophia Lillis as Doric, a tiefling druid raised in the Neverwinter Wood
- Regé-Jean Page as Xenk Yendar, a paladin who escaped the lich Szass Tam’s rise in Thay
- Daisy Head as Sofina, a Red Wizard of Thay who practices necromancy
Sofina and Forge orchestrated the capture. She orders Ed and Holga executed. They run instead, and the plan becomes a vault robbery timed to the High Sun Games.
The Vault, the Helm and the Graveyard
Here is where Honor Among Thieves earns its keep. Doric shapeshifts into a fly and slips into Forge’s castle, only to find the vault sealed by magical defenses from Mordenkainen that Simon cannot disable. The fix is a relic called the Helm of Disjunction, and finding it means traveling to a graveyard to ask Holga’s ancestors where to find it.
Simon resurrects the dead with a talisman, long enough for them to answer questions. The corpses reveal they gave the Helm to Xenk. That sequence is the film’s clearest argument for itself: a game mechanic — ask the dead a question, get one answer, watch the clock — turned into a scene with a beginning, a middle and a punchline.
Grant’s Forge is an ambitious rogue and con artist, and Grant plays the charm without softening the rot. Page’s Xenk is a paladin who ages more slowly than a normal human, and the film hands him the sincerity the story needs. Rodriguez gets the physical comedy, and she lands it.
Where the Movie Slips
The film has no connection to the trilogy released between 2000 and 2012, and that is a mercy. Development went through various phases since 2013, beginning at Warner Bros. Pictures and later moving to Paramount Pictures, each with various writers and directors. Goldstein and Daley were the final writers and directors, using elements from the earlier attempt by director Chris McKay and screenwriter Michael Gilio. Filming began in April 2021 in Iceland and later Northern Ireland.
You can feel the years of rewriting in the middle. A heist movie lives on the plan, and this one takes its time laying the pieces out.
None of that sinks it. The tagline is “No experience necessary,” and the movie means it. You do not need to know what a Harper is, or a tiefling, or a Red Wizard, to follow a man trying to get his daughter back from a man who stole his life. That is the actual pitch, and it works.
What Honor Among Thieves Gets Right
The published critical score sits at 7.2/10, with a Metacritic mark of 72/100. That is about right, and it undersells the thing slightly. This is not a great fantasy film. It is a great hang, which is harder to build than people admit.
The reason to watch is the tone. Goldstein and Daley never wink hard enough to break the world, and they never take the world seriously enough to bore you. Pine plays Ed as a man who talks his way through problems because he has nothing else, and the film lets that be funny and sad in the same beat.
The larger point is that Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves proves a licensed movie can be a movie first. It does not ask you to have played the game. It asks you to care whether a father gets his daughter back, and it earns that.
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