Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves is why I love fantasy - and is actually GOOD.

This is a Full Spoilers Review.

It contains Full Spoilers, if you don't wanna be full spoiled don't full spoil yourself.

It's a full spoiler spoiling-fully review.

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First: this film is gonna be called D&D HAT when people reference it compared to other D&D films. Just wanted to let you know that. This is the Dnd hat film.

Second, let's get into it.

Short review is that if you like fantasy, wanted a finally good D&D film, like adventure films and hope this is good, it's good. It succeeds on all counts.

It's not the best film ever made, not the most sincere, but it manages to tell a whole lot more than just good guys vs bad guys within it's less than 3 hour runtime.

You'll also be relieved to know that it isn't... y'know...

'He's right behind me isn't he?'

Entirely doused in layers of irony and immersion-breaking 'comedy' where it becomes so self-referential and intent on showing they're ironic than sincere that it becomes draining and annoying.

It's not so far intent on comedy that it ruins the serious premise, stakes, or loses sight of the heart it's trying to present, and actually manages to put forward a quite complex heart in the end as well.

So let's get into the full spoilers stuff that reminded me I love fantasy and made this movie, good.

The core ending and emotional heart and point of this film is about a notion of heroism versus selfishness that Chris Pine's 'Edgin' tries to work through.

Edgin's your usual thief with characterisation of a bit of a useless streak yet redeemed by a quick tongue and heart of gold, somewhat Marvel-esque white male protagonist who's confident but the joke's often on him (Iron Man, Starlord, later films Thor), but he manages to be given enough sincerity to his character and backstory that he's infinitely more watchable.

Prior to the film's events, his wife died because he stole from the wrong people and they took revenge, which directly led to her death.

This made him guilty about it and after being in a bad way having to raise his daughter alone, found Holga (Michelle Rodriguez), a barbarian with her only pity for his infant daughter, not him.

After thieving a lot, they went to do a final heist wherein Edgin intent to steal a resurrection stone, thereby reviving his wife and giving his daughter his wife and her mother back alive.

Before Edgin and Holga are captured during the heist, Elgin gives the stone to Hugh Grant's 'Forge', a fellow thief, under the instruction Forge keeps Edgin's daughter safe and uses the stone to return his wife.

So.

The film opens with Edgin and Holga in jail explaining this succinctly and with genuine laughs which... admittedly for me might have been a little too much, but did help with the pay-off within the film itself.

They break out, then meet up with Forge who is now Lord of Neverwinter, rich and titled, and has Edgin's daughter Kira now a young girl and 'safe' with him in his castle.

So Forge is the thief who's now holding hostage Edgin's daughter as a surrogate Dad.

The stealing in the 'Honor among thieves' film isn't just for gold. Smart smart smart smart smart. Simple but smart. I like it.

Now to the end of the film.

Upon meeting with Edgin and Holga, Forge manipulates Kira into believing bad Edgin father. kicks out Edgin and Holga, and lies to Kira that Edgin only wanted a resurrecting stone because it was a Stone of Riches.

And to the end, when this is all resolved the way you'd expect, Forge is exposed to Kira as a big bad evil guy, Holga is killed in the attempt to save the city-

The stone of resurrection comes back into play with Edgin having to decide whether to use it on Holga, or wait and save it for his original intent on using it to save his wife.

So the end of this Dungeons & Dragons film is a man who stole for good intentions of saving a life of someone clearly shown to be a good enough person and Kira's genetic mother, mentioning it in text, and deciding between his belief that his wife would be a good mother for his daughter, or remembering the actual memories he's seen between Holga and Kira, and realising the amount of fine his former wife would be with death, knowing her daughter would have a mother she herself had grown to love, over his own selfish want to return his wife on the possibility of her being a good mother to Kira.

So basically: holy shit.

Il'l get back to that in a second. I feel like I do have to review it a little beyond the ending to give proper context of the goodness. Other filmmaking/writing stuff works in the film.

The CGI is purposeful, plentiful, but not excessive. They're doing an adventure film post 2005 so yeah, they've got a bunch of CGI for animal fighting and . For you action, you've got a great sequence of wild-shaping and several well-choreographed action scenes where a singular hero fights a group of baddies and cute them down with the modern style, one big hit from one person to the next, but it's all entertaining and does what it needs to. Are we showing this person is a funny idiot or a proper hero? Proper hero. Right, they do the action scene.

Which brings us to the cast,

The performances are all round at least good. Everyone does what they have to, Edgin is charming and occasionally self-serving or uncaring. Holga has some well-choreographed fight scenes to serve as showing her ability as much as giving you your action and characterise her as the real hero where Edgin is kind of crap without her. Simon has self-esteem issues then whaddaya know pivotal moment does it. Hugh Grant's Forge is hammy evil, the usual, the usual.

Regé-Jean Page plays 'Xenk', the Drax character in this group of Guardians.

Xenk is a man who's misunderstanding of jokes and sarcasm is played through his so very sincere intent on heroism that he literally does not have time for humour. He turns up for one part of the adventure and plays my favourite character in the film.

More than Drax in some performances, he's not just a character for laughs, but to help revive Edgin's past heroism, as well as provide some much needed articulate and earnest fantasy dialogue that I've been craving for since The Great American Irony took over in '07. I'm saddened that it's played for comedy itself and only has moments of seriousness where the film doesn't use him for a joke of being so good the team looks bad, or so serious he's misunderstanding, but he's great in the role he's given.

When you look at the cast and what they have to do compared to a lot of acting these days, Regé-Jean has to play it properly against CGI monsters when at least Marvel guys get to goof around and it stills stays in. Holga's action scenes actually impress and her monotone apathy actually makes you smirk. I can't fault the cast.

That all plays into why I liked the film, but I have to go back to the main reason it made me love fantasy again. The ending to this film, though at first glance pretty standard sacrifice fare, is I think emotionally potent, well-thought-out, and one of the most genuinely altruistic and complex self-sacrifices I've seen in cinema in a while.

Like, normally these things just deal with 'Would I give my own life to save the whole world' and it's like 'Yeah duh been there done that get on with it'.

This film creates a much more intensely personal and subjective decision, and builds in text both the legitimate problem of choosing between lives, and ends with a man not only asking his daughter for what she wants, mentioning explicitly that they can only do it once, and with his daughter deciding to bring back who she wants because of how much she loves her as a mother even though for the father the only connection with the woman in the film is as a friend, but the film visually represents this.

Through his flashback of his wife, this letting go is shown and foreshadowed in the form of the blue moth he let go throughout the film, his first wife's memory which isn't just to show their connection or how kind she was, but in a few lines of dialogue establishes her and his altruism and how he knows she would be fine with dying, and how he has to let her go. He's trying so hard to get through to dealing with the moth through some masculine courage, and in the end she just opens the window to let the blue moth go.

And the writers and directors of this film had the self-awareness to not do a Blade Runner of repeating those lines with a repeated wife's flashback or echoed voice lines in Elgin's head in the end for the dumb dumb audience. They let the visual of the blue moth play out for itself once established with a few blue moths throughout the film.

This film is good. It's a fantasy adventure that doesn't just establish a good male character, but creates and plays out a kind of heroism that goes far beyond just saving a city of people, where the real problem is which singular life do you save, who you love the most or who your daughter needs the most .

To speak to the bad sides, because it's not perfect, the only fault in this is the kind of horror of the decision. That in a way, Elgin's asking a child who just lost their surrogate mother how she feels about it, right after Holga died, so of course Kira's going to say she wants Holga back in the emotional wreck of just losing her and saying "I need you, I need you..." for the audience and character to understand the importance of using the stone on her.

The fact this is in a way a forced moment takes away a little bit. Where a more responsible father character might actually have had to ride this out and give Kira the talk about good people, maybe having her realise Holga wasn't the most altruistic and let her grieve before returning his wife, because she may have been a better mother for all we know, Edgin and the film have no interest in playing this out with more nuance than that- but then again it is the finale.

So the main fault is it's kind of brought about by the pressure of timing and social embarrassment. Sociologists be weepin'.

But narratively it works to show the thief is the most self-sacrificing. He not only has his monologue about being the biggest failure of the group, explaining his urgent intent to make plans and make sure everything goes well, but it serves to show an altruism that is more tangible than saving a city of people or making them rich.

This film doesn't just have a thief with the heart of gold to choose to save a life over riches, or save a city over riches or want to resurrect his wife and save his daughter over riches: but this guy is having to self-actualise the choice between a woman who for all we know would actually be a good mother to his daughter as well as know would be a good wife to him, with a woman who herself grew a connection with his daughter.

So it's about saving the connection between two people, reviving a good connection, get this, after dealing with the evil bad witch's spell to turn everyone into undead thralls. As well as having several corpses to revive and talk to throughout the film to help them uncover the location of an important artifact.

They thematically wove the hypothetical concept of revivals to make an ethical argument about the value of tangible experiences between a mother and daughter, neither of them the principal characters into an adventure film, coming to a nuanced conclusion that was satisfying and made sense, all through the vessel of a thief who had to self-sacrifice by doing this.

And they did it in a fantasy film.