Recently, with Game of Thrones spawning a multi-million dollar television franchise and Amazon willing to build the most expensive television franchise ever around Tolkien’s Lord Of The Rings novels, the fantasy-adventure genre has been going through an onscreen renaissance. The latest addition to this beloved genre is a feature film adaptation of the popular tabletop role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons. Titled Dungeons and Dragons: Honour Among Thieves, the film is directed by Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley.
The director duo, best known for helming the 2018 action-comedy Game Night, have also penned the screenplay, based on fifty years of game lore.
Dungeons and Dragons: Honour Among Thieves has Star Trek-fame Chris Pine playing a bard, who along with a band of misfits, goes on an adventure to find a magical relic and ends up clashing with evil forces. Pine, also the co-producer, notes how Honour Among Thieves has all the charm of 80s adventure films. “For me, being an ’80s baby, it reminds me of all the wonderful qualities of ‘80s films. It has a bit of The Princess Bride. It has a bit of The Goonies. It has a bit of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. It’s got a bit of Game of Thrones. It manages to wrap up all of these different tones and colours into one really joyful film,” Pine adds, noting that the film is a classic journey about a group of misfits trying to do better.
According to Chris Pine, his character Edgin Darvis is hardly the stoic, swashbuckling hero we find in adventure stories. He is a bard who sings his heart out and also has the unrelenting optimism to find hope in even the bleakest situations. The actor says, “He might seem like he has his stuff together, but more often than not, he’s winging it. It makes him, I think, a likeable thief.”
He further opines that beneath all the rollicking adventures, Honour Among Thieves is essentially about the camaraderie that organically develops among a group of characters. “You have a story about a ragtag group of people that are going up against immense odds and immense nemeses and it looks like they are never going to succeed. This is a fun film. This is big, emotive, great old-fashioned moviemaking.”
The star-studded cast of the film also includes Hugh Grant, Michelle Rodriguez, Rege-Jean Page, Justice Smith, and Sophia Lillis. Dungeons and Dragons: Honour Among Thieves is set to hit theatres on March 31.