… is sorely lacking in the new D&D movie. Which, after all, is based on what at its heart a risk and resource management game.
People assured me that this film adaptation of Dungeons & Dragons – the 4th overall, though it’s a reimagining/reboot – doesn’t insult its audience with overt Wokisms.
Those people don’t know when they’re being insulted.
For real, they’d have to be the type who’d go see Rodney Dangerfield, have him riff on their faults all night, and go away thinking he was just making small talk.
Maybe I’m starting off on the wrong foot here.
Look, I don’t want to give you the impression that D&D 4, or whatever we’re gonna call it, is Death Cult agitprop on the level of a Netflix series or a Disney live-action remake.
It’s not “Woke to the point of destroying every character and rendering the plot nonsensical.”
But it is just good enough to let fun-starved moviegoers turn a blind eye to the Death Cult box-checking that squandered the film’s potential.
And it had a lot of potential, which is all the more tragic.
We can’t have nice things, and the weird secular religion that almost all corporate managers submit to is why.
Hang on. I’m getting ahead of myself.
Let’s start again from the top and look at actual movie stuff like plot, character, and themes, OK?
OK.
Alright.
Ohh, boy.
The best way to give you the gist of Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves is “The A-Team meets Ocean’s 11 on the set of Thor.”
Imagine a low fantasy heist flick written by Joss Whedon, Directed by Stephen Soderbergh, and produced by Stephen J. Cannell, and you’ve got the mood and tone.
That thought experiment also tracks this movie’s plot progression, since it feels like each of those three was in primary charge of one act, in that order.
“A band of outlaw misfits with complementary skills out to nab some loot,” you might say. “That sounds like fun.”
And it should have been. In fact, it still is at times.
But it’s nowhere near as much fun as it should have been.
Because we’re long past the stage when movies could just be movies.
Now they must meet the deranged managerial class’ bizarre moral purity laws.
Pointing this stuff out again and again is getting tiresome, so I’m going to bullet points.
- The DIE casting quotas are as bad as an NFL commercial.
- I’m serious. They do it with every couple in the movie. We’re talking Norwegian-married-to-Maori-tribesman levels of demographic absurdity here.
- Which you could chalk up to fantasy (though having to do so highlights the oddity), but not the beclownment of every white male character.
- ‘Tis true. We have to wait 2 acts for a male character to do any real heroics and 3 acts for a white male to act heroic.
- Meanwhile, strong independent female™ characters are pummeling 300-pound knights in full plate and tossing them around.
- Yes, one of them is an owlbear at the time. We can make allowance for owlbears. But the 5’4″ woman trouncing whole platoons makes no more sense for it.
The Grrrrl Power! is so pervasive, it removes any trace of dramatic tension from the movie’s first act.
No lie. It never feels like the characters are in real danger until Act II.
But then a diverse supercharacter shows up and handles the first real threat for the main party.
Fun fact: The supercharacter who’s dropped into the middle of the movie was supposed to be Drizzt Do’Urden. He was written out due to some unspecified “controversy” at Hasbro. If you know who he is, you can fill in the blanks.
So instead of Drizzt, we got an autistic paladin.
Who to be honest, is pretty cool. He at least understands refusing to cooperate with evil.
But even though he’s a holy knight, he never mentions any deity.
Neither does the other cleric-adjacent character, the druid.
Religion has always been a core component of every D&D character. So it’s super weird that D&D4’s writers never even mention Forgotten Realms’ fake pseudo-pagan gods.
That omission might be significant. Or it might not. I don’t know.
I do know that the film’s structure is a mess. It’s told in a disjointed combination of linear scenes and disjointed flashbacks that slip in, sometimes at random.
It’s like the film makers decided “While we’re ripping off Joss Whedon, we may as well ape Quentin Tarantino, too.”
But it doesn’t work.
Fine, the flashbacks during the parole hearing work. But the ones in the graveyard go on way too long. And the one at the end should have been moved to Act I. Placed at the end, it withholds necessary information that makes an important character choice confusing until after the fact.
I’m not being hypercritical here. The friend I saw the movie with brought most of this stuff up, too. And he has a lower opinion of the movie than I do.
Which, for the record, is that I think it’s worth seeing if you’re a D&D 3.5 or later fan – but not worth paying for.
Because there are 2 characters that the movie handles well.
The first is the druid.
Somehow, the film makers resisted the temptation to make her a tree-hugging, Academy Award-refusing Captain Planet extra.
Which they do tease before pulling a delightful twist.
And Sophia Lillis’ performance sells her back story.
That story being she’s the part-demon offspring of human parents who abandoned her in the woods as a child.
Shades of the Jersey Devil.
Knowing Current Year Hollywood, making her an actual devil may have been the only way to include a blue-eyed redhead.
Self-indulgent side note: Sophia Lillis has now replaced my original casting choice of Jane Levy as the female lead in my imaginary Soul Cycle movie series.
What was I saying before this?
Oh yeah, the sorcerer.
Credit where credit’s due. They nailed this one.
Every character except the paladin has some kind of arc. And Simon the mediocre sorcerer has the best.
He starts in a position of weakness and must overcome his own self-doubt to save the friends who refused to stop believing in him.
It’s the one element straight out of classic fantasy. And it culminates in the movie’s one genuine stand-up-and-cheer moment.
And then we get a final showdown lifted whole cloth from an MCU movie.
Then, for some reason, more misplaced flashbacks.
If you really have to go to the movies or you’ll suffer a psychotic break or something, John Wick 4 is still in theaters as of this writing.
Just go see that.
Or re-watch the 2010 A-Team movie. That one was ultra-underrated. And it has Bradley Cooper, too.
And if you absolutely insist on seeing the new D&D flick, find a (legal) way to not pay for it.
You’ll find a few suggestions here.
