Meewella | Critic

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Tag: Sophia Lillis

QuickView: Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves (2023)

Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves poster

“If the existing plan fails, I make a new plan.”

Edgin

Dungeons & Dragons’ phenomenal rise in popularity over the past decade made a new cinematic adaptation an inevitability. Directed by the co-writers of Spider-man: Homecoming, this is similarly a film that prioritises the relationships between its likeable heroes over world-threatening stakes. The party members are tropes — charismatic bard, stoic fighter, insecure sorceror, insufferable paladin and distrustful druid — imbued with personality by their actors, but the inspired decision is to place Chris Pine’s bard at the centre, since his careful planning followed invariably by chaos and improvisation perfectly captures the nature of the tabletop game. This approach allows the writers to flex their creativity in presenting and overcoming challenges as they set up a heist, including the best use of portals I have seen on screen. As the antagonist Forge, Hugh Grant channels his Paddington 2 performance without overplaying the comedic elements. Those hoping for the sweeping majestic grandeur of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings will be disappointed as, despite the decades of lore establishing the Forgotten Realms, Honour Among Thieves is a lightweight tale that engages in limited worldbuilding — we see a little of Neverwinter and the Harpers but the script is generally content to name drop inconsequential references for fans’ benefit. Visual effects are deployed in service to the story, with impressive swirling magical vortices and a menagerie of the Monster Manual’s fantastic creatures. That Honour Among Thieves has been so well received is no doubt aided by low expectations after 2000’s abysmal Dungeons & Dragons, but it is nevertheless a solid foundation on which a new cinematic franchise could be built.

7/10

QuickView: It (2017)

It poster

“I want to run towards something, not away.”

Beverly Marsh

A surprisingly enjoyable (rather than scary) experience, It is filled with a series of beautifully shot and creatively weird scenes, having more in common with Stranger Things‘ blend of nostalgia and the supernatural than most contemporary horror. Jump scares are few and far between, in favour of steadily building atmosphere. Where modern horror tends to focus on individual isolation (a reflection of current anxieties), It is told from the perspective of the Losers Club, a group of unpopular adolescent outsiders. Disquiet arises through the group’s collective isolation from the community and particularly the adults in their lives. Like much of Stephen King’s work, It explores the loss of innocence and the murky underbelly of small town American communities. The film is slightly too long for its content (a cinematic streamlining of the book’s first half) and splashing through identical sewers becomes repetitive. Despite the recently released sequel, this first chapter feels complete if not always cohesive ⁠— perhaps due to its extended gestation period under multiple directors ⁠— and its most striking imagery will certainly linger in the mind.

7/10

"A film is a petrified fountain of thought."

(CC) BY-NC 2003-2023 Priyan Meewella

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