Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves Review: A Flawed Adventure That Deserved a Bigger Audience

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves is a 6/10 film with a strange afterlife: three years on, its commercial failure feels like more of an injustice than its flaws ever did. Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley’s 2023 adventure grossed about $208 million worldwide against a $150 million budget, a number that effectively shelved the franchise film series. Revisited as a catalogue watch, it is easy to see both why it underperformed and why it deserved better.

The party is the whole point

Chris Pine understood the assignment completely. His Edgin is a bard in the truest tabletop sense, a man whose actual character sheet is charisma and whose plans survive contact with reality for roughly one scene at a time. Around him, Michelle Rodriguez’s Holga, Justice Smith’s insecure sorcerer Simon and Sophia Lillis’ shapeshifting Doric form a genuine party rather than a cast: they bicker like people who have failed together before, and the film’s best running joke is that their competence is collective, never individual.

The humour is the film’s most durable quality. It is written with actual timing rather than improv-shaped filler, from Regé-Jean Page’s magnificently literal paladin Xenk, a straight man so straight he bends the scenes around him, to a graveyard interrogation sequence built on one escalating rule that remains the film’s comic high point. Hugh Grant, as the oily con-man Forge, does his late-career smarm specialist routine and the film is better every minute he is on screen.

Where it rolls low

The villain problem is real. Grant’s Forge is entertaining but weightless as a threat, and Daisy Head’s Red Wizard Sofina, the actual danger, is a stock doom-sorceress with no interiority, the kind of antagonist franchise fantasy was supposed to have outgrown. Because neither villain generates pressure, the stakes stay theoretical, and the story defaults to a familiar fetch-and-heist shape you can call three scenes ahead at almost every turn.

The effects are the other drag. For a $150 million production, the CGI is strikingly uneven: the practical-leaning creature work (the portly dragon Themberchaud remains a delight) sits alongside composite-heavy sequences that look a tier below the budget. When the climax commits to spectacle, the seams show at exactly the wrong moment.

Why it still deserved a bigger audience

Here is the thing: almost nothing else in studio fantasy this decade has captured what playing the game actually feels like. Plans that fail sideways, a party covering for each other’s dump stats, rules exploited to their letter rather than their spirit; the film treats the source material as a sensibility, not a map of lore to genuflect at. That is a harder trick than it looks, and most game adaptations before and since have missed it entirely.

It arrived in a brutal corridor, days before a juggernaut video game film swallowed the spring box office, carrying a brand that decades of bad adaptations had taught audiences to avoid. The result is a film whose word of mouth was consistently warmer than its ticket sales, and whose sequel prospects died for reasons that had little to do with what is on screen.

Verdict

A 6/10 on the merits, with weak villains, a predictable spine and effects that undercut their own budget, but the merits that do work, the cast chemistry and the jokes, are the expensive ones that most franchise films never manage. Honor Among Thieves deserved a bigger audience than it found, and it rewards the one still finding it on streaming. Watch it for the party; forgive it the plot.