By Mark Fields
The best way to approach Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves is to manage your expectations. If you go into it expecting either groundbreaking moviemaking or a full cinematic embodiment of the popular role-playing game, you will surely be disappointed. But if you enter the theater wishing for some lightly diverting entertainment for the next 134 minutes, you will likely find some measure of satisfaction. Chris Pine, Michelle Rodriguez and Hugh Grant lead the cast in a familiar quest adventure to retrieve some priceless object after a set of weird challenges in strangely named places blah blah blah. All three are mostly walking through familiar roles: Pine the smart aleck, Rodriguez the hardass, Grant the cad. They clearly understand they are merely human props to react to the medieval-fantasy special effects. Those effects are fine, holding the attention most of the time. The movie overall does better when it emphasizes the comic moments over the “sword and sorcery” portentousness that pervades this entertainment genre. Fun for the moment, but fairly forgettable.
