This week on Fabulous Film and Friends I’m taking the time on our special 60th episode to come clean and admit I was wrong.
Joining me as witnesses to my admission of guilt are series regulars David Johnson D.M.D. and erstwhile screenwriting collaborator, camera assistant, film editor lifelong gamer and creator of an unfinished and unknown role playing game entitled Swords and Adventure! Kendrick D. Wright.
Okay, here’s some context for this week's mea culpa. Nearly a year ago on the Fabulous Film & Friends Facebook Group I posted the trailer to Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves and I wrote:
"Dungeon Masters! Behold! A wrongheaded Giant Turkey bomb with plus 4 box office poison approaching the battlements. "
To which Kendrick replied,
"I've been saying for 20 years that somebody needs to take a serious movie approach to D&D, and it could be a real satisfying blockbuster. With endless sequel opportunities. I don't think this movie is it. But I won't assume that it will obviously suck. I think there's a "chance" they can put a decent story together, but it's a long shot for sure... What they need is to slow it down like a Western, have one third the action, one third the spectacle, real character development with real motivations, and take the material mostly seriously the way Star Wars did. Midway between this jokey approach and Game Of Thrones. Would be epic..."
And then I replied,
"All anyone had to do for the right tone is watch Fire and Ice. For some reason the producers handling D&D keep thinking it’s a comedy."
So first off,
Not only was my prediction about the box office incorrect, I was dead wrong about the quality and tone of the film. 2023’s Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves starring Chris Pine, Michelle Rodriguez, Regé-Jean Page, Justice Smith, Sophia Lillis and Hugh Grant looked to me to be a jokey, CGI laden misfire with a cast of under-achieving diversity hires adding an ironic, postmodern sensibility to a genre that should be literal, serious and heavy on swearing and spittle.
Well, the film is all that I thought it would be with one notable exception: It’s not a misfire. The film works. The cast is funny and engaging and everything that looked lazy and tiresome in the trailer seemed charming and witty when played out in real time.
Meanwhile, just for a comparison, we watched Fire and Ice, I think it was for the first time for Ken and Dave, and probably the 7th or 8th time for yours truly. And while Ralph Bakshi’s and Frank Frazetta’s 1983 animated Fire and Ice still holds up for me as a visual spectacle, this time around I did find myself questioning my love of a film with an overly simplistic and underwritten screenplay.
But before we dig in: the synopses.
Fire and Ice tells the story of Larn, a warrior of the lava people of Firekeep who teams up with a lone wolf warrior named Darkwolf to rescue Firekeep’s gorgeous and always nearly naked Princess Teegra who has been kidnapped by the evil Ice Lord Nekron and his sinister mother Juliana.
Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves is actually the 4th D&D movie to be produced --there’s a trilogy consisting of one theatrical release and two straight to video releases from the early 2000’s that no one ever saw. But this film follows a pair of disgraced Warriors turned thieves Edgin and Holga who along with a ne’er do well wizard and an outcast shapesfhifter go on a quest to find magical items in order to save Edgin’s daughter from Forge, a con man and former teammate who betrayed Edgin and Holga at the behest of the evil sorceress Sofina.