Review: Dungeons & Dragons - Honour Among Thieves

Dungeons & Dragons:
Honour Among Thieves*¹
Cert: 12A / 134 mins / Dir. John Francis Daley / Trailer

Six years feels like a long time for a film to be in development in this day and age. When I say 'development', I mean everything after that day in 2017 when the Hasbro exec in charge of D&D watched Jumanji and hollered "GUYS why aren't WE doing that?". Because evidently that happened...

And so it comes to pass; the very archetype of furrow-browed geekdom for half a century stripped of sharp edges and gatekeeping, retooled as a kid-friendly action comedy starring familiar faces from some of the entertainment world's most successful franchises. And, pleasingly, it works very well.

BARD

Chris Pine leads a pack of mythical adventurers as Edgin the bard (one of only two characters to get any significant backstory work), joined by Michelle Rodriguez's Holga the barbarian (she's the other one), Justice Smith's Simon the wizard, and Sophia Lillis' Doric the druid. Together they try to remove the reins of power from Hugh Grant's Forge (a former ally but perennial con-man) and Daisy Head's Sofina the evil wizard. Chloe Coleman also stars as Edgin's teenage daughter with abandonment-issues. Honestly, that girl doesn't have any luck.

All of these performances are fantastic on individual levels*², although the chemistry between players is lacking somewhat. It's unclear whether this is down to slight miscasting or the challenge of working under two directors. The script, meanwhile, manages to hold the whole thing together, and the film's strength is that its writer/directors have penned this as an action-comedy first and foremost, with the branded tie-in opportunity taking a back seat (Hasbro get their name in the titles, so shifting units from toy shop shelves is down to them now).

The storyline itself is a more standard 'break into the castle / steal the treasure / realise the treasure wasn't the most important thing' affair, which makes up for its shortcomings by deftly spinning the plates of showcasing its characters. While the movie certainly borrows tonally from both its parent-franchise and the wider genre, there are relatively few nods to the mechanics of roleplaying games themselves. But at the height of Act III we do get what initially appears to be a blink-and-you'll-miss-it reference to the iconic 1980s cartoon iteration*³, although this is hammered home a little more firmly in the following minutes to ensure value for money.

CHAT GPT

At its funniest when it really leans into its gags (the extended necromancy scene is delightfully inspired), for all D&D's throwaway quality it's not without a few moments of meta-smartness. A particular favourite comes in the second act where it's suddenly crystal clear than Hugh Grant is playing his slimy, boisterous con-man by doing a 100% impersonation of Boris Johnson, and perhaps because the directors hadn't twigged what he was doing (and because this works for the part anyway), it stayed in the film untouched.

Of course there's a finale to be had, and Honour Among Thieves gets messy in places, not least when it tries to raise its dramatic intensity. Coincidentally, that's also when the film is at its most ordinary as a popcorn-flick. Naturally it will hold the door open for sequels, but providing they expand upon this world rather than just rehashing gags, there's the potential for real greatness in the future.

Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves is good. In some places it's almost great. But the elusive Epic Quality™ needed to elevate fantasy films to all-timers is just out of reach here.

Decent work though, lads.
Now do Gauntlet...

*¹ Okay before anything else, I'd like to add how quietly impressed I am at the UK distributors Entertainment One rebranding this with the British spelling of Honour for the United Kingdom promo materials. Because that means there's been a meeting about it pretty high up, and a grammar pedant has absolutely lost their shit until they got their way, and I am here for that.



^{[ BACK ]}

*² Genuine credit to Californian actor Justice Smith, whose movie-long British Accent™ is admirably close enough to work for the majority of viewers, but just subliminally wrong enough to be distractingly off-kilter to vocal nit-pickers like myself. ^{[ BACK ]}


*³ Spoilers, highlight-to-read: Seriously though, I thought that the cartoon reference was going to be Sofina attaching the red-wizard's horn onto one side of her shaved head to channel Venger and attain ultimate power. Alas not. Shame. [/ENDS] ^{[ BACK ]}


DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.

Review: The Gentlemen (third-pass)

The Gentlemen
(third-pass / spoilers)
Cert: 18 / 113 mins / Dir. Guy Ritchie / Trailer

It's an odd thing how over the years our favourite films - or at least those we choose to watch the most - aren't always the ones we initially thought the most highly of. I originally scored Rian Johnson's Looper 6/7, despite being a logistical and philosophical masterpiece. The Coen Bros' Inside Llewyn Davis came in one point lower. Yet both have stayed with me ever since, and even made it into by best-of-decade list.

So watching Guy Ritchie's The Gentlemen for a third time within a month, I still stand by the reservations from my first and second passes. I still think it lacks the urgency of Lock, Stock, the playfulness of Snatch and the swagger of RocknRolla. I still think Matthew McConnaughey, while he throws in his all, isn't quite right for the role of Mickey Pearson.

CONTACTS

Apart from anything else, although Pearson has been in the UK since his university days, he's still very outwardly American - using that to his advantage with underworld and aristocratic contacts alike. But because his rival of Jeremy Strong's Matthew Berger is also from the US, what we end up with is two outsiders arguing over the turf of a third party (ie the UK). To have Pearson be a British kingpin bristlingly defending his spot (eg Lenny in RocknRolla) would have made for a more dynamic film. If anything, the 'natural' protagonist with this cast should be Henry Golding's Dry Eye, having been brought up on London's streets. Alas, his character is firmly second-tier (albeit as part of an incredibly strong second-tier).

Likewise, Charlie Hunnam's Raymond isn't quite as roguish as the screenplay needs him to be, despite a choice scene with a machine gun (which he very obviously did not have under his coat when sprinting thirty seconds earlier, especially given that it hangs below the coat-line when he re-conceals it) and some beautifully eyebrow-raising language. And had The Toddlers appeared in an earlier Ritchie flick, they'd have fit right in with the grime, desperation and ineptitude; here they're oddly out of place.

ARRIVALS

But I digress. Truth be told, this third-pass was engineered in the capital to fit in with a jaunt down to Shepherd's Bush to visit The Princess Victoria pub from the film's opening moments. We jaunted, we visited, we saw the sights. Marvellous stuff.

The Gentlemen is cracking fun and has already earned a pre-booked place on my shelf for slick, easygoing, loudmouthed carnage. It's not the best student in its class, but is already a favourite. Apart from anything else, how many other 5/7s have had three turns in a cinema round these parts?

Guy Ritchie's good films.



See above.



See above.



Not really, but that doesn't hold it back.



We might.



There isn't.



Level 1: Rogue One's Red Eleven is in this.







DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.

Review: The Gentlemen (second-pass)

The Gentlemen
(second-pass / spoilers)
Cert: 18 / 113 mins / Dir. Guy Ritchie / Trailer

Ah, that's better. Ever one for a convoluted yarn which becomes clearer with repetition, Guy Ritchie plays true to form and a second viewing of The Gentlemen is a much more jaunty ride. The web is tighter, the violence is weightier and the bad language is every bid as gloriously, needlessly lurid as it was the first time. I'm not saying that any cinematic reveals appear miraculously or that the score gets notched up for a second-pass, but this is definitely now a movie I can envision enjoying with regularity (and with alcohol) in years to come.

Is The Gentlemen Ritchie's best work to date? It is not. Does it show him developing his style as a filmmaker and using old tools to new effect? It does not. But is the film worthy of shelf-space with Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels, Snatch and RockRolla? Most certainly. And is The Gentlemen the fourth part of a spiritual tetralogy with these earlier films? Well not quite...

GUY

The Gentlemen is never as grimy as its predecessors. And that's fine because like Guy, we're moving in a different world, now. We don't see the sex-shop-magnate's office, the East End pawn shop or spend too much time in a dingy crack-den. All of our players here have money and power from the off, they're just squabbling over each others. There's no real chase, just a fight for survival. There's no MacGuffin.

Now. The MacGuffin (alternately McGuffin or Maguffin) is a plot device, usually an object or person, which draws the tale's disparate characters together. It's the thing which everybody's after, which would solve all their problems if it fell into their possession, despite usually being the source of those problems at the same time. Whether it's the The One Ring, the Death Star Plans or Doug from The Hangover, the MacGuffin is a classic storytelling device, and for good reason.

What's more, Mr Guy Ritchie is no stranger to this. Each of his three previous geezer-flicks have had their characters racing around London after treasured items. In Lock, Stock it was a pair of antique shotguns, Snatch boasted a huge diamond, and in RocknRolla the object of everyone's affections was Uri Omovich's lucky painting. All of these are old-school artefacts, still sought after as hard currency by the modern criminal businessman, very much a window into Ritchie's psyche at those points.

DOLL

In 2020 however, Mickey, Matthew, Fletcher and Dry Eye forego these trinkets. We open with a pivotal feint, then a legthy establishing scene in a kitchen-diner that's worthy of a stage-production. The introduction of Fletcher's screenplay brings us kicking and screaming into the ethos of cinema and a catchup/flashback for the first two acts, structuring the story that way instead. Along with Charlie Hunnam's Ray, we're listening to a shaggy-dog story rather than chasing the dog itself (another of Guy's earlier MacGuffins).

There's the small matter of a van-full of stolen weed, not to mention the missing child of a wealthy family who's fallen into a pit of substance-abuse, but these are red herrings. Both have appeared in earlier movies by the writer/director, and serve here only as tonal callbacks. Potentially, Mickey Pearson's dozen underground farming outlets are the MacGuffin - they're certainly the prize being vied for by Matthew Berger and Dry Eye - but since actual control of these is never wrested from Mickey, they're more of a narrative finish-line. And it's the absence of this panic, this pursuit, this race against the clock which hobbles Ritchie's latest offering as a very good movie, rather than a truly great one.

The MacGuffin is by no means essential to a great screenplay, but it's a solid start. You'd think an aspiring screenwriter like Fletcher would know that, and you'd expect it from Ritchie. I am loving the ride of The Gentlemen, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't miss the chase...

Ritchie's earlier geezer-features, if you took out anything which could be hidden in the back of a van...



If you're a fan of Ritchie's gangster-oeuvre, yes.



As above.



With the best will in the world, it is not.



With the best will in the world, we very well might.



There bloody isn't, but there are two boot shots.



Level 1: That weapons check enforcer dude is in this.







DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.

Review: The Gentlemen

The Gentlemen
Cert: 18 / 113 mins / Dir. Guy Ritchie / Trailer

You can take the boy out of London but you can’t take London out of the boy. And so Guy Ritchie returns to the mockney wide-boy swagger that made his name in the 1990s with The Gentlemen (formerly Toff Guys, formerly Bush), a well-worn knotted yarn of gangsters, guns and the grinning sociopaths of the capital’s underworld.

However. The hurdle Ritchie seems to keep snagging is that each time he waits a decade to make the pilgrimage, he never quite comes back to that same sweet spot. Laden with slightly too much baggage for better or worse from more mainstream projects, the writer/director is hostage to his own better and worst excesses. And so it proves.

CHARMING

In The Gentlemen, minder and enforcer Raymond (Charlie Hunnam) is paid a late-night visit by the charming but weasely private investigator Fletcher (Hugh Grant). The sleuth has been tasked in uncovering the secrets of Raymond’s weed mega-entrepreneur boss Mickey Pearson (Matthew McConaughey), but knows he can probably score a larger payday by using this dirt as blackmail leverage instead. With key characters coming in the guises of Michelle Dockery, Henry Golding, Jeremy Strong, Eddie Marsan and Colin Farrell, it’s a star-studded, sprawling and deliberately labyrinthine tale.

And as is so often the case with Ritchie’s gangster oeuvre, this works both for and against it. Our auteur conflates confusion with cleverness and slapstick with style. The screenplay is brimming with the harshest of needless expletives, its pacing all over the place like a first-draft written in a pub. Around a third of the actors do well, another third are fine but mis-cast and the rest of the roles could be played by anybody to similar effect.

Reader, I enjoyed it.

DARKNESS

Make no mistake, The Gentlemen is not a return to the heady days of Lock, Stock or Snatch, but if you liked the much-underrated RocknRolla then there is fun to be had in this manor. The weaving plot will reward repeat-viewings, as will the more gaudy punchlines and the performances of an established cast trying their damnedest with a script that reads like a live-action cartoon. This is definitely the film you would expect Guy Ritchie to make.

Back in the day, the director came under fire for being a posh-boy playing dress-up in the East End. As time went on and he demonstrated his weaknesses at mainstream cinema, Guy was called out as an imposter at that party, too.

The Gentlemen is very much where Ritchie finds himself now. Clearly too well-heeled for Chicken Cottage, but looked down upon at Nando’s. Guy Ritchie is the KFC of British film-making. And that’s absolutely fine, London is big enough to embrace all of these outlets and for each to thrive.

The problem is that Guy Ritchie is trying to work all of these restaurants from one menu...

The intensity of Layer Cake with the ADHD of Smokin' Aces.



If you're already aboard The Good Ship Ritchie, hell yes.



It is.



It is not.



That's likely.



There is not
And it's not like there aren't two ideal opportunities.



Level 1: Idrosen Gawat is in this.







DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.

Review: Paddington 2

Paddington 2
Cert: PG / 103 mins / Dir. Paul King / Trailer



Everyone's favourite impeccably mannered Peruvian is back, in a follow-up adventure to his 2014 debut, this time on a quest to by beloved Aunt Lucy a vintage pop-up book of London for her birthday. But when a washed-up actor steals the antique, framing Paddington as the culprit, the bear finds himself in prison and has to clear his name.

Ben Wishaw's voice-work for the title role is seamless and utterly delightful once again, but director Paul King conjures standout performances from Hugh Grant as unstable narcissistic thespian Phoenix Buchanan, and Brendan Gleeson as impatient incarcerated chef Knuckles McGinty. Grant is in full comedic flow, happy to embrace the role and poke gentle fun at his own career (indeed, profession), whereas Gleeson succeeds by playing his part completely straight, as if he were acting opposite a human rather than a CGI bear. To a slightly lesser degree, the entire cast*¹ do this of course. Indeed, like last time, the genius-stroke of the film is that everyone treats Paddington as a three-dimensional character (whether they're 'on his side' or not), rather than being freaked out by an actual talking bear*². It's this sincerity which is passed down to the audience, and the central character becomes inherently believable.

Paddington 2 is a fantastic, fun adventure; but it's predecessor was more than that. The sequel's story itself is a little more pedestrian and doesn't carry the same social or emotional weight as the first movie (Peter Capaldi's reprise in particular feels like a tacked-on callback, and some of the first-act incidental scripting is nothing short of cringeworthy for a film that's so naturalistic everywhere else). While there are moments of brilliance in the film, these come more from setpieces and comic timing than The Message. But the heart of the film is still a young person who manages to find the good in almost everyone, a valuable example for audiences of all ages.

Paddington is the bear we need, even if he's the one we probably don't deserve...



…Paddington.



For an afternoon or evening out with the family, absolutely.



I think so, although its target is a lot broader this time around.



No, but that's not to put Paddington 2 down.



Nope.



Nope.



Level 1: Blue Five pilot Farns Monsbee is in this*³, as is that young lady we met ever so briefly on Naboo.





*¹ A roster which is, it really must be noted, absolute textbook Nina Gold casting, with the notable omission of one Bill Nighy. So I'm just going to assume that curmudgeonly Bill absolutely hates Paddington Bear until he explicitly states otherwise. I think that's fair..? ^{[ BACK ]}

*² And it's a credit to the finished product that I was sucked in to the point where I started picking apart the logic in the climactic train-chase. At one point, two separate steam trains are running on parallel tracks out of Paddington Station towards Bristol (leaving from different platforms), then seconds later they're on the same line (the only line, so lord knows where this stretch of track is meant to be). Who's controlling the track-points? What about all the red-signals they're clearly barging through? Skipping over the viaduct which doesn't exist on that line (that section was filmed in Yorkshire) and the fact that a high-speed chase would have to go through Reading station full of commuters at around 7am, young Paddington ends up trapped in a separated carriage underwater. We see the water level rising and the bear keeping afloat as he rises toward the roof, then the camera cuts to Sally Hawkins' Mary, who's swimming down to rescue him. Only as she approaches the padlocked carriage door with the 10" gap and a bear on the other side, the water has suddenly filled the box completely (as it would with that gap) without us seeing the air escaping before the carriage had even hit the river-bed. Will no-one think of the physics? Will no-one think of the signal controllers having the worst fucking morning of their lives as lights and klaxons go off all around them? It was then I remembered that I wasn't watching a documentary. So well done, Paddington 2. ^{[ BACK ]}

*³ And much like in the first Paddington movie (at the time, at least), isn't credited on IMDB for the appearance. Although he does at least get his writing-entry. ^{[ BACK ]}


DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.