Dungeons And Dragons: Honor Among Thieves

I went to see this movie last weekend. Sorry, this review isn't fresh! Squeezing in time to blog has been a bit tough lately. Between then and now, I had a lapse of memory and couldn't even remember who played the main character (sorry, Chris Pine), though I did remember Hugh Grant being the lighter of the two main heavies. It also features – well, read the poster. It's a fun, action-filled adventure with lots of laughs, based on the fantasy role-play game that, you bet, I played when I was a kid. So there's, like, a bard-turned-thief, a warrior woman, a con man, a paladin, an elf sort of person (she's described as a "wild shape" because she can change forms), a couple of wizards (one good, one bad) and a quest involving breaking into an impregnable castle to steal back the bard-thief's daughter, who has fallen under the manipulative guardianship of the con man.

Rather than synopsize further, which would only spoil the non-stop fun, I'll just head straight into Three Scenes That Made It For Me: (1) Bard-thief and warrior take advantage of a parole hearing to bust out of prison, right at the beginning of the movie. The scene includes a lot of backstory exposition while also being hilarious and, right at the end, thrilling. (2) The team being chased by undead warriors and a ridiculously fat, but still scary, dragon. (3) All the hijinks involving the good wizard's teleportation spell, which the hero group uses to create a sort of portable hole.

I've never bought into the claptrap that D&D, or AD&D for that matter, was a gateway to devil worship, or demon possession, or psychotic breaks, or whatnot. OK, it's possible for players to run evil characters, but it isn't advised. In order to campaign as a group, players pretty much always roleplay the good guys, albeit with varying degrees of mischief (I could tell a few stories). The main danger of the game as I've partaken of it is to lose track of time and forget to do other important things, like sleeping, eating well and finishing your homework. It's nice to see a fantasy movie that breathes that atmosphere of youthful fun.