Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves

In the year of Barbie and Oppenheimer, Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves was the best pure adventure film Hollywood released and the one most people forgot to include in that conversation.

It should not work. The D&D brand carries decades of geek-culture baggage, a catastrophic 2000 film adaptation, and the cultural assumption that anything derived from a tabletop roleplaying game is too niche for mainstream cinema. Writers and directors Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley ignored all of that, made a genuinely funny ensemble quest film rooted in family love and self-sacrifice, and delivered one of 2023's most warmly entertaining blockbusters.

The plot: Edgin Darvis (Chris Pine) is a former Harper agent turned petty thief, currently imprisoned in the frozen north alongside his barbarian partner Holga Kilgore (Michelle Rodriguez). They escape. Edgin needs to reclaim a magical tablet that can resurrect the dead so he can bring back his murdered wife. To get it, he needs to reassemble his crew: a hapless sorcerer named Simon (Justice Smith), a tiefling druid named Doric (Sophia Lillis), and reluctantly, the assistance of a paladin named Xenk (Rege-Jean Page). The complication: Edgin's former partner Forge Fitzwilliam (Hugh Grant) has stolen his daughter Kira (Chloe Coleman), convinced her that Edgin abandoned her, and installed himself as Lord of Neverwinter with the help of a Red Wizard of Thay named Sofina (Daisy Head).

That is the setup. The execution is what matters.

The screenplay is the best adventure comedy script since The Princess Bride. It is genuinely funny in the structural sense, not just in the 'here is a quip' sense: the jokes are built from character, consequence, and setup-payoff logic. The five-questions scene is the film's showcase sequence, where Edgin is granted five questions to ask the dead, makes predictably foolish choices with each one, and the increasingly desperate comedy is built entirely from who Edgin is and what he wants. The undead crypt sequence is the next best: timed gags, callbacks, and physical comedy at a level the live-action Disney remake era has never achieved.

But here is the thing that the film's marketing did not emphasize enough: Honor Among Thieves has a genuine emotional core. Edgin's real arc is not about retrieving a magical tablet. It is about whether he can be present for his daughter rather than lost in grief and self-deception. Pine plays this with full commitment. When the film's climax arrives, the choice Edgin faces is real and the cost is real and the scene works because Pine has done the emotional work across the preceding two hours.

For conservative viewers: Honor Among Thieves is ideologically nearly clean. The VVWS scoring shows +9 TRAD margin, which is the film's honest position. The traditional elements are genuine and central to the story: family love as the engine of heroism, self-sacrifice as the climactic resolution, redemption through taking responsibility rather than running from it, and the consistent punishment of greed and betrayal.

The woke elements are mild and front-loaded. The ensemble is diverse, but the diversity is genre-appropriate for a fantasy setting that inherently includes elves, tieflings, and wizards alongside humans. Doric is a tiefling druid with blue skin and horns; the visual diversity of a fantasy world is inseparable from its genre conventions. Simon's character arc involves overcoming self-doubt, which is universal rather than ideological. There is no political messaging, no social justice subplot, no lecture.

Hugh Grant's Forge deserves special mention. He is playing a conservative audience's nightmare: the charming, well-dressed establishment figure who has captured the city's institutions, convinced everyone he is their benefactor, and been systematically looting them the entire time. The film frames this as straightforward villainy, not as critique of any specific contemporary political position. Forge is punished not by being exposed as ideologically wrong but by being exposed as personally dishonest. The resolution, public humiliation at the hands of a working-class thief and his friends, has a populist energy that plays well across political lines.

The action is inventive, the Forgotten Realms world-building is confident without being encyclopedic, and the film trusts its audience to keep up with fantasy genre conventions without stopping to explain everything. The result is a blockbuster that respects the intelligence of its audience while remaining genuinely accessible.

Box office note: Honor Among Thieves grossed $208 million worldwide against a $150 million budget. It was considered a disappointment by studio standards. It should not have been. The film deserved a bigger audience than it got, and its home video life has been kinder. If you missed it in theaters, fix that.

Formula: Weighted Score = Severity × Authenticity Multiplier × Centrality Multiplier

🔴 Woke Tropes

Trope	Severity	Authenticity	Centrality	Score
Diverse Ensemble Cast with Female Co-Lead	2	Moderate	Moderate	2
Non-Human Character / Marginalized Identity Metaphor	1	Low	Low	0.7
Institutional Corruption as Central Obstacle	2	Moderate	Low	1
TOTAL WOKE				3.7

🟢 Traditional Tropes

Trope	Severity	Authenticity	Centrality	Score
Parental Love as Heroic Engine	4	High	High	5.04
Self-Sacrifice as Climactic Resolution	3	High	High	3.78
Redemption Through Taking Responsibility	3	High	Moderate	2.1
Greed Punished / Virtue Rewarded	2	Moderate	Moderate	2
TOTAL TRADITIONAL				12.9

Score Margin: +9 TRAD