Normally film studios really go to town playing up the connections between any new movie they release and previous films, no matter how tenuous the link. Releasing an entirely original, standalone film is, after all, just about the biggest gamble you can take in the modern cinema marketplace – if you’re aiming for a commercially successful blockbuster, anyway. And yet one gets the strange impression that Paramount Pictures and their associates are doing everything in their power to ignore the fact that their shiny new action-comedy Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Amongst Thieves is actually the successor to a notable trilogy of films that came out a couple of decades ago – and they’d quite like everyone else to ignore that connection, too. (I have to say that giving the film its own subtitle is possibly a bit of a giveaway in this department, although they could just be planning for the future.)
The reason is probably something to do with the fact that the original D&D movie, directed by Courtney Solomon and released in the States at Christmas 2000, was not only a box office disaster but also, in the opinion of many who’ve seen it, one of the worst films ever made. (We went to see Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon around the time this film was in UK cinemas and were shocked to be told ‘it’s terrible’ – our waitress turned out to have got her dragon-related films mixed up.) This is not something you want to be associating yourself with. The fact this sucker has the D&D name all over it must have caused a lot of heartache at the offices of Hasbro, current producers of the game.
An executive at the company recently complained that the game was ‘under-monetised’ (this emerged during a brief but vicious conflict between the owners of the D&D game (as in the people who own the legal rights to it) and the owners of the D&D game (as in the many millions of people who regularly play it and have made it such a success)) and the emergence of the new movie is presumably an attempt to fix this. The first D&D film was, one assumes, a similar attempt to raise the profile of the game and draw more people to it; the director recalls that some of the production’s troubles were the result of the game’s owners insisting it be ready so its release would coincide with the launch of a new edition of the rules.
Dungeons & Dragons is set in the land of Izmir, a fairly generic fantasy realm where the young but noble Empress Savina (Thora Birch) is locked in a power struggle with the evil mage Profion, who sounds like the brand name for a painkiller. (Profion is played by Jeremy Irons, who gives an… interesting performance). Currently Izmir is a hierarchical state where the wizards are at the top and everyone else is at the bottom, but Savina wants to fix this. Profion simply wants to steal the throne, he’s just one of those megalomaniac type of villains.
Victory in this struggle will likely go to whoever gets their hands on a plot device called the rod of Savrille (one really has to watch one’s spelling when summarising this particular plot) which will allow the wielder to tell red dragons what to do (dragon colour is significant in D&D, you may not be surprised to learn). Shanghaied into helping Savina are two young thieves named Ridley (Justin Whalin) and Snails (Marlon Wayans), who end up knocking around with a posh young mage (Zoe McLellan) and a ginger dwarf (Lee Arenberg). Chasing after them is Profion’s henchman Damodar (Bruce Payne in white lipstick) and his soldiers. To motivate him, Profion has magically put a monster in Damodar’s head, and so tentacles occasionally come out of his ears in moments of stress.
What ensues is basically a chase around for plot coupons, which takes the form of various sub- and side-quests – for example, they must brave the thieves’ maze of Antius (operated by Richard O’Brien), break into a castle to free someone who’s got captured, keep their hands on a magical map, and so on. At one point they even meet Halvarth, king of the Elves (a very rare late big screen role for the great Tom Baker, who apparently found the whole experience somewhat bemusing – ‘am I not a bit tall for an Elf?’ he supposedly asked the producers at his audition). In the end there is a big fight between the two sides, mostly using red and gold dragons.
And it is pretty much as bad as its reputation would lead you to suggest. To be honest, Dungeons & Dragons is always going to be a tricky thing to adapt into other media – it’s not like a book, or even a normal boardgame, because it doesn’t have a story per se – you make the story up yourself by playing it; indeed, creating your own story is essentially what it means to play D&D (or any other table-top role-playing game). This is the unique feature of this kind of game, and why many of the people who play them become so devoted to them.
Unfortunately, the kind of combined map-tour-and-plot-token-scavenger-hunt which is passable as the basis for a D&D game session is a pretty hackneyed structure for an actual fantasy movie; you really have to do it well for the movie to work, and this seems to be harder to achieve than you’d think (off the top of my head, the only film which really gets away with it is Krull). This is why the traditional sword-and-sorcery fantasy film had such a terrible reputation for so many years – most of them were saddled with terrible plots and embarrassing production values. Dungeons & Dragons is a textbook case of this sort of thing: never mind the story, the special effects are appalling – it looks like Ultrasquid Vs Hypercroc, or another of those knuckle-dragging films which endlessly turn up on it’s-still-the-Horror-Channel-to-me.
We should probably mention a few of the special ways in which Dungeons & Dragons is bad, though. Leaping first to mind is Marlon Wayans’ character Snails, who is a cowardly idiot much given to high-pitched shrieking in moments of stress. In short, he is the hero’s comedy-relief black sidekick, and seems to be a holdover from a film from the 1930s. The film’s big moment of angst for the heroes comes when Snails gets killed, but this is such a relief for everyone else that it has no real impact at all, and the revelation at the end that he’s not actually dead is more depressing than anything else. Most of the other acting in this film is quite affectless (though Zoe McLellan is quite winsome and has good hair); Tom Baker is only in one brief scene; and Jeremy Irons… well, actually, he’s better value than you’d think, as he seems to think he’s appearing in a pantomime and takes the opportunity to go roaringly over the top every chance he gets. It’s still an awful performance, but it has a sort of entertainment value sadly lacking from most of the rest of the film.
It’s bizarre to think that within a year of New Line releasing Dungeons & Dragons they also produced the first of the Lord of the Rings films – in fact, it has been suggested that the D&D movie was intended to create an audience for fantasy films that would help Peter Jackson’s trilogy be more successful (another connection is that Jackson tried to get Tom Baker to audition for Gandalf, but the actor didn’t want to go to New Zealand for a year). Tonally, visually, and dramatically they are utterly different – they are as far apart as two films in the same genre can possibly be. Apparently the new movie is rather better judged, in terms of… well, everything, but not least its commercial prospects. I doubt this will do much to salvage the original D&D‘s reputation, or that of its sequels (which are presumably even worse). This belongs in the Temple of Elemental Rubbish.