Questaholic - June 2023

Oh...oh no.

Look, I know that we have a substantial D&D community here in the clan, and I know that a lot of those folks really liked this movie (at least that's the impression I've gotten from my highly-unscientific survey), but I'm going to end up being fairly unkind to it, and I hope those people will forgive me. It's not that I think it was a bad movie, per se, it's just that I'm dead inside and the only way I know how to consume media is to obsessively point out its flaws, and Honor Among Thieves is deeply flawed.

Let's do plot first: the film takes place in the same Generic High Fantasy Setting that pop culture dug out of Professor Tolkien's backyard about fifty years ago (the world has a name, and I understand from research that it's part of the popular Forgotten Realms campaign setting, but truthfully I did not absorb this detail from the film itself). The plot follows Edgin (Chris Pine), who used to be some kind of spy until his wife was killed by evil wizards and he turned to thievery, and his burly partner-in-crime Holga (Michelle Rodriguez), an exiled barbarian. After escaping from prison, the two travel to the city of Neverwinter to collect Edgin's daughter, Kira (Chloe Coleman), from their old friend Forge (Hugh Grant), a conman who has somehow been put in charge of the city during their imprisonment. Unfortunately, Forge has decided that he quite likes being a surrogate father, refuses to give Kira up, and tries to have Edgin and Holga killed.

Obviously they escape and start plotting their revenge, which they enact with the help of Simon (Justice Smith), a less-than-competent wizard, Doric (Sophia Lillis), a shapeshifting druid who is primarily interested in taking down Forge over his deforestation policies, and Xenk (Regé-Jean Page), a hyper-competent but humourless paladin. Meanwhile, it turns out that Forge has allied with Sofina (Daisy Head), a sorceress who not only is the one who got Edgin and Holga imprisoned, but is secretly a member of the same group of evil wizards who killed Edgin's wife, and who plans to use Dark Magic to turn the population of Neverwinter into zombies. Solving one problem naturally results in the group solving the second, the gang are heroes, credits roll.

I have one major issue with the film, but before we get into that let's knock out some smaller niggles. Firstly, the film is absurdly paced, rocketing between action setpieces like a greatest-hits compilation of Roadrunner cartoons. It rarely gives itself time to breathe, which creates big problems for the parts of the film that are predicated on an emotional connection between characters, because those connections, for the audience, largely haven't been established. The biggest casualty of this is the relationship between Kira and Holga, which underpins the emotional climax of the film. We're told that Holga helped raise Kira, and that Kira sees Holga as more like her mother than her birth mother (who died when Kira was a baby), but we're shown that in only two short scenes:

1. A two-minute montage of Edgin's life before prison, at the very start of the film, and
2. A one-minute series of flashbacks to this period of their lives, shown right at the end of the film

We're told this relationship exists, and intellectually it makes sense that it does, but the audience doesn't feel it, largely because the film's rapid pace means the characters spend nearly no time together on-screen. The end result is that the emotional climax has no weight, which is a shame because without emotional stakes, a modern action film is just a screaming toddler smashing CGI toys together. Which can be entertaining in its own right, but isn't what I'd call "good."

On a somewhat related note, the tone is all over the shop, and suffers really badly from over-the-top bathos. If you've never heard that word before, "bathos" is a term coined in the 1700s by English poet Alexander Pope, used to described failed attempts at creating "high art"; in modern parlance, it's largely used to refer to the juxtaposition of the serious with the absurd, usually (though not always intentionally, or successfully) for comic effect. Bathos isn't necessarily a bad thing - consider most of Douglas Adams' work for example - but it's a dangerous tool because the absurdity of the second part inherently undermines the seriousness of the first; that becomes a bigger problem the more serious that serious part is.

To take a concrete example from Honor Among Thieves, an early scene has Edgin giving the "how we got here" exposition in the form of petitioning the prison parole board on behalf os himself and Holga, while simultaneously stalling for time to allow Jarnathan, a member of the board whom Edgin and Holga are implied to know personally and who was delayed, to arrive. The audience is constantly reminded that Edgin is waiting for Jarnathan, because he peppers his monologue with offhand remarks like "I know Jarnathan would appreciate this." Which is fine, until he does it immediately after describing the death of his wife, which is the driving motivation that underpins the plot in general and Edgin in particular. That's entirely too serious, and the bathos of pivoting from that moment into a joke shatters the tension not just of the scene, but of Edgin's entire character.

To be clear, I'm not complaining that a comedy film has jokes in it. But if a film expects me to take emotional moments seriously, it needs to treat them as though they are serious, otherwise I'm not going to buy into them.

This, in turn, ties into a larger problem where the film prioritizes one-off jokes over narrative cohesion. Another example comes quite a bit later, when the party are searching for a magical helmet that was last seen at a massive battle many years prior, which nobody is known to have survived. Fortunately, Simon has a magical talisman that can temporarily revive the dead, and allows you to ask them exactly five questions (a specificity which is lampshaded in an actually good use of bathos - lest you think I couldn't find anything to like in this film). So they go to the site of the battle, dig up the corpse of one of the fallen warriors, revive him, and promptly waste their five questions talking amongst themselves. It's a good bit, the humour derived from the subversion of the characters' (and the audiences') expectation that "five questions" means "five questions directed at the corpse", rather than "five questions uttered in the corpse's earshot." I liked this joke.

Next we see the party dig up another corpse and, learning from their mistake, immediately ask him if he had seen the helmet; he had, and he tells them who he saw it with before his death. Great, they can go dig that guy up and ask him; except, this corpse now complains that he's still alive, so to placate him they ask four utterly banal questions ("what's your favourite book" kind of thing) until he returns to the sweet embrace of death. Again, I like this joke. Then we move into a montage of the crew digging up corpses and charting the helmet's path through the battle; we don't see them asking five questions to each corpse, which is fine because we can assume that they're doing this every time, we've seen it once and don't need to see it again. Once more, I have no problem with this.

Where I have a problem is when they get to the last corpse, who passed the helmet off to the aforementioned Xenk prior to his death. The crew talk amongst themselves for a bit, and then go to leave. Except the corpse is still alive, but rather than grant him eternal rest they decide to just leave him.

In isolation this is also a good joke, and it's in-character for the very mercenary crew, but in context it bothered me because I was paying attention to the dialogue, and the party asked each other about seven questions within earshot of this final corpse, which means that by the rules they had previously established, he should have conked out long before they left to find Xenk. Am I nitpicking? Absolutely yes. But this kind of thing takes me out of a film, because high fantasy lives and dies on consistent rules; the rules don't have to be complex, bear any relation to the rules of the real world, or even be stated, but they need to exist, and they need to be followed, otherwise the narrative reality breaks down. This isn't a massively offensive example (the original Ghostbusters, as much as I love it, is much worse at this), but it highlights a lack of care in the script. Or, more likely, a lack of focus; the writers (or the director or producers) came up with all of these jokes to use in their necromancy scene, couldn't bear to cut any of them, so they used them all.

And now we come, at last, ~1500 words in, to the main problem I had with the film, which I'm going to summarise with a question: who is this movie for? It's not for hardcore D&D fans, or at least not exclusively; Paramount wouldn't have sunk $150 million into a film for a niche hobby group. For comparison, the animated Super Mario Bros, based on arguably the most popular video game character of all time, had an estimated $100 million budget; and The Flash, which had three Oscar-nominated actors (and one winner) in its supporting cast, reportedly had $190 million to play with (though some reports put it in the $200-$220 million range). The problem is that it's not really for mass audiences either, which I can tell because it makes absolutely no effort to bring newcomers into its world.

See, high fantasy (that is, fantasy genre fiction which takes place in an entirely constructed universe; some scifi also does this, but if there's a simple phrase for the subgenre I don't know it) has an inherent problem where the audience is unfamiliar with how the world works. In something like The Lord of the Rings, leaving aside its titanic cultural legacy, the audience has no idea of the geography, political systems, or how physical rules (including things like magic and elves) work; so if the story wants to extract drama from those elements, it needs to explain them to the audience. Doing that organically is very hard, so these types of stories often include an audience surrogate character, someone who also doesn't know these things and so can justifiably be exposited at for the benefit of the audience. In Lord of the Rings this is the hobbits, who are competent within their homeland (which, incidentally, is very familiar to audiences, being essentially the archetype of a pastoral village) but unfamiliar with anything beyond, and thus more knowledgable characters can explain things like who Sauron is without it feeling forced.

Honor Among Thieves takes a different approach: just not bothering. There are no audience surrogate characters, everyone is reasonably familiar with the world, and necessary exposition is generally limited to more esoteric knowledge (like Simon explaining certain nuances of magic). This isn't an intrisically bad choice, and it's actually a lot more organic to have the rules of the world demonstrated rather than explained in dialogue, but it's a risky one because it makes it harder for viewers to get into the world, and therefore into the dramatic stakes that derive from the world's rules; there's always going to be a bit of cognitive processing devoted to "wait what are they talking about?" This film works better than some (The Chronicles of Riddick springs to mind) because it doesn't deviate that much from familiar genre tropes, and it's generally not hard to follow the plot, but at times I found it difficult to really figure out the stakes. One notable example of this is how Forge becomes ruler of Neverwinter.

Considering how everyone keeps calling him "lord", I spent much of the film viewing it through the framework of real-life (or fictionalized) nobility, which is usually hereditary but with a higher authority able to elevate a commoner in reward for some service. Since everyone talks about Neverwinter as an established location, that made the second option vastly less likely, so I was operating on the assumption that he had forged evidence of relation to the prior Lord of the City, and taken over when he died; in which case, surely a simpler plan than the one the party comes up with (essentially a bank heist) would be to go to that higher authority and prove he was lying. It wasn't until nearly the end of the film when I realized that the real-life reference I should have been using was the Doge of Venice, essentially a monarch elected by the nobility; so presumably Forge paid off the Neverwinter equivalent of the Venetian Quarantia, and so robbing him was actually the soundest strategy. This was bothering me for probably an hour, which is an hour where I wasn't immersed in the film's world.

Is it a fatal issue? Not really, it's just annoying. Or it's annoying to me, anyway; maybe I'm the weird one here. I do only have 9 Charisma.

That was a D&D joke. Did you get it?

Oh fine. Final analysis? It's basically fine, even some good bits, but if you're not a D&D fan don't be surprised if the world leaves you behind.