If you’ve ever been to a Jimmy Johns, you’ve probably — and I say probably because god knows how rushed or drunk you were — seen all of the motivational placards that poster the walls in each of the franchise’s locations. One of those is particularly relevant to the topic at hand, which features a list of witticisms and advice from a “major tech company owner” or some approximation of such, given that they probably couldn’t accurately attribute any of those quotes properly to Bill Gates. Most are boilerplate, but it’s the last one that sticks out in my mind: “Be nice to nerds. Chances are you’ll wind up working for one someday.” If there’s any single aphorism that best describes the transformation of modern blockbuster cinema since, say, 1977, it’s that one. The whole of show business now revolves around the rose-tinted nostalgia of a late-Gen Xer or early millennial’s basement haunt, stacked with Nintendo cartridges and comic books, a semi-Fortress of Solitude occasionally opened up to dice-wielding pals, with the trappings of adulthood via parental supervision forbidden by “the management” (and, to my parents, I am still sorry about that sign on my bedroom door). It is an oasis of childhood tranquility as brought to you by Hasbro and their corporate brethren, and it acts as a kind of historical marker for when helicopter parenting and the modern-day isolation and alienation of trapped, stunted youth, began. There is a line running from those Atari afternoons to our Tik-Tok presence and subsequent moral outrage — some justified, some not, but still plastered all over the mainstream press’s opinion pages. But, importantly, a select group of those once-and-future kids do run the world, and are probably, on some level, your bosses’ bosses, especially within entertainment and tech.
There’s perhaps no greater proof of the totality of the nerd’s victory than in the redemption and promulgation of Dungeons & Dragons as a valid past time and, now, cultural force. Sure, one could attribute this solely to Stranger Things, another homage to the basement, but the winds of change were blowing before Eleven was a glimmer in a Duffer brother’s eye. One doesn’t need to look any further than, say, 2012, when a movie like Zero Charisma attempted to articulate the difference between the old-school nerd, whose steadfast devotion to his favorite hobbies served as both an easy excuse for his ostracization rather than his manner and personal hygiene and the modern-day one, with the nice house and girlfriend and money to pursue these hobbies without having to devote themselves in the same fanatical way. This isn’t to say that D&D wasn’t popular — indeed, there was a Saturday morning cartoon — but, like the comic book, society-wide panic pushed it to the margins before the winds began to change. The time was never quite right for a full mainstream comeback, as they tried and failed to bring it to the big screen in 2000, but times have changed. When you combine the forces that have propelled it to the forefront of popular culture: that burst of popularity, the gates being lowered for entry as represented by the changes made to the game’s modern editions, and the rapid cottage industry of cool media personalities either working in the field (podcasts like Critical Role or The Adventure Zone or shows like Harmonquest) or staking a territorial claim (Vin Diesel, long the one true TTRPG nerd, has been joined by the likes of Joe Mangianello and Matthew Lillard), you wind up with a film like Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, a big-budget extravaganza that’s being greater with interest, not skepticism or mockery.
On some level, the ideal D&D film has already been brought to the screen in the form of the modern-day Jumanji films, which owe a decent amount of credit to the trails blazed by the original cartoon. Despite being centered around video gaming, at its core was a pretty spot-on representation of the tabletop roleplaying experience: The escapism, the make-your-own-fun, the questing, the sentimental potential for life-changing lessons learned, etc. Honor Among Thieves takes the more traditional tack, weaving a pretty typical fantasy yarn that contains one key difference between it and its modern-day genre companions. Unlike, say, Lord of the Rings or Narnia, it is unencumbered by required fidelity to a source material’s storyline, merely using the world and the iconography within it to tell the particular story that filmmakers John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein want to. This creative freedom is a blessing far more than it is a curse — in the early minutes, it can be hard to make heads or tails of exactly what’s going on or what the hell the characters are talking about, but eventually, the film settles into a swell groove.
This is thanks, in part, to the swell cast, who make up a pretty winning adventuring party. At the forefront are Edgin (Chris Pine), playing a bard and thief who, once upon a time, was an honorable ranger, and Holga (Michelle Rodriguez), a barbarian who left her tribe behind to marry a halfling and, through sheer happenstance, wound up becoming a friend of Edgin’s and, essentially, Godmother to his daughter (her mother, Edgin’a wife, was killed by a group of vengeful dark mages). The film opens with the pair in prison, waiting for the right opportunity for a jailbreak. They were wrongfully put there after a heist went sideways, and the pair yearn to be reunited with the girl, who’s being looked after by their buddy Forge (Hugh Grant), who is practically wearing a sign that says “untrustworthy villain” over his head. Sure enough, the pair do escape and discover that Forge has become the ruler of a major city, thanks to the help of his assistant Sofina (Daisy Head), who has dark plans for its inhabitants. Forge, of course, betrays them, and the pair plot their revenge and the rescue of Edgin’s daughter. There’s a giant gladiator game happening soon in town, and all of the richest men in the realm are stashing their goods in Forge’s vault, and they decide to rob it. To do so, they’ll need help from Simon (Justice Smith), an insecure yet charming mage, and Doric (Sophia Lillis), a shapeshifting druid with little patience for tomfoolery, and a little bit of assistance (he’s more of a wandering ronin) from Xenk (Rege-Jean Page), a paladin who is basically the prototypical knight-in-shining-armor.
The script is unsurprisingly solid, given Goldstein and Daley’s background as writers of occasionally good ensemble comedies, and the cast sell a lot of bits that might not otherwise work as well as they should, such as a series of graveyard interrogations that involve both resurrections and conversational frustrations. The pair use the arcana of the world as their launch pad, seeking out fun wherever they can find it, and that freedom is essential to why it works so well as blockbuster entertainment. More surprising is how well-directed much of the film is, though if you were a fan of their previous movie, Game Night, you likely can imagine the competency that film had in style and tone being applied here. There’s a host of creatively-designed action sequences, which lean into the combination of course and chance that define the game’s speed and movement, such as when Lillis infiltrates Grant’s castle and is forced to take on a number of different animal forms in her escape — fly, hawk, deer, etc. — as well as a dungeon crawl in which the gang encounters a pretty hefty dragon, as rotund as he is powerful. It prioritizes creativity and cleverness in a way that few franchise films do in this era, perhaps because Goldstein and Daley are aware that they can’t just rest on the same kind of laurel of familiarity that your average YA or superhero movie can. Like in the early days of the MCU, they have to make something entertaining enough to convince the skeptics in the crowd that it’s okay for them to have a good time, though with less flippancy and more genuine wit.
Yet that same freedom is a bit of a curse: given how much plot there is — there’s nearly a dozen set-pieces strewn about with the requisite exposition to justify them — the pair are occasionally unable to give a sense of the world that surrounds these characters, and there’s little in the way of tangible stakes. It’s easy to forget how essential the scenes in Hobbiton at the start of Fellowship of the Ring are to establishing what could be lost to hordes of Orcs and Uruk-Hai should Sauron return and begin his conquest, and there’s little of that here. But that kind of weightlessness allows the film to be as nimble as it is, and it remains a good time even if it could potentially be a more fulfilling one. As you might have noticed if you’ve read these pages for a bit, I wasn’t expecting much out of Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves — it looked generic and had the stench of IP capitalization all over it. While both of those things are kind of true in the final form, it’s a solid romp that is charming enough to elide those concerns, crafting a personality that eludes a lot of other like-minded original fantasy films.
Moreover, it represents something even more interesting: Its success — financial and otherwise — may prove to be the final nail in the coffin of the “nerd” identity as it has been codified and subsequently commodified. Sure, the representative figure of the basement-dwelling awkward child-adult will always exist in some capacity, but in a way, we’ve all joined them in there, for better or for worse. Whether this is a joyous acceptance of formally-frowned-upon interests and activities, free of judgment and full of inclusion, or a type of gilded prison, with the edges sanded down so no one can get hurt and our corporate jailers keeping the keys to adulthood further out of our grasp than ever — or some mixture of the two — depends on what you roll.