In the back corner of my bedroom closet, in a locked wooden chest, resides an item I “borrowed” long ago, at great personal risk, from the study of the last known Archcritic, Treberegor. It is a powerful but dangerous artifact, a remnant of the ancient time when the Archcritics, weaving spells from the fabric of language itself, created weapons mightier than even the finest sword. For years, I have resisted the urge to use it, for its eldritch energies make the wielder angry and cynical. But now, a great evil threatens the land, so I am left with no choice. This review calls for the Poison Pen +2.
Dungeons & Dragons, the movie, is an insult to anyone who has ever engaged pencil, paper and imagination to enter the Tolkien-inspired world of Dungeons & Dragons, the role-playing game. The ability of the game’s fans to suspend disbelief—something they’ve been doing regularly in basement rec rooms and around hobby-store tables since 1974—will be sorely tested by this cut-and-paste assemblage of horrid performances, lousy computer graphics and plot clichés as old as an elf’s grandfather.
The film is set in the land of Izmer, where a power struggle between a child empress and an influential, scheming wizard threatens to plunge the empire into civil war. Sound familiar? Get used to it, because this is only the first of many things lifted shamelessly from various Star Wars episodes.
As with most of the D&D game’s modular storylines, the only way to vanquish evil and restore order is for an assortment of heroes to undertake a quest for some mystical object or other. Normally, this involves spelunking in Dungeon A, finding Artifact B, and bringing it to Location C in order to reveal the whereabouts of said object—in this case, a dragon-controlling rod that can swing the balance of power in favour of whichever side finds it first. It’s typical D&D boilerplate, and I was expecting nothing more. Sadly, director Courtney Solomon’s execution is only slightly less amateurish than that of the pimply fat kid who acted as Dungeon Master in the dice-rolling sessions of my youth. There’s so much wrong with this picture, I scarcely know where to begin… how about the characters?
Good characters have always been the heart of any D&D adventure. Unfortunately, I could swallow a handful of Dungeon Dice and fart better characters than the ones in this film. As the destined-for-greatness thief Ridley, Justin Whalin has little to offer but the same grinning, goody-goody wholesomeness he displayed as Jimmy Olsen on TV’s Lois and Clark. Even so, he’s a regular Olivier next to Marlon Wayans as Snails, Ridley’s partner in crime. It is apt, however, that Wayans is cast as a thief, because he steals liberally from Chris Tucker’s performance in The Fifth Element. But where Tucker was a hilarious, hyperactive scream (believable in that film’s freaky-futuristic context), Wayans’ urban-jester antics are merely an infuriating anachronism. Call me stodgy, but the word “damn” has no place in the Christianity-free parallel universe of D&D, especially as commentary on a female’s appearance.
Speaking of women, they fare little better. American Beauty‘s Thora Birch does a weak Queen Amidala impression as the benevolent Empress Savina, an egalitarian who wants to eliminate her kingdom’s long-entrenched class distinction between elitist mages and mundane, magic-challenged commoners. Zoe McLellan (an actress whose oeuvre includes two credits as “Girl #4″), plays a low-level student mage with all the conviction of someone who thinks D&D is for geeks.
The party of heroes is rounded out by Kristen Wilson, who makes a suitably attractive elf, and Lee Arenberg, who makes a suitably bearded dwarf; but their presence is superfluous at best, underwritten to give Wayans enough screen time to appeal to the Scary Movie demographic. Bad decision—they’re the only authentic-looking characters in this crumbling ruin of a movie, not to mention the only remotely interesting ones (unless you count dork-cred cameos by Doctor Who‘s Tom Baker and The Rocky Horror Picture Show‘s Richard O’Brien). Besides, as any D&D veteran knows, one thief in a party is quite enough.
Of course, the bad guys are usually the crowd-pleasers. Not this time. Jeremy Irons stoops to a heretofore unthinkable level as the evil Arch-mage Profion, who likes the mage-favouring class system just fine. With every snarled line of brutal dialogue and stentorian gesture, Irons further enshrines himself in the pantheon of All-Time Worst Performances by a Fine Actor. Bruce Payne, the sword-wielding villain in Highlander: Endgame, plays Profion’s sword-wielding henchman Damodar. His armour is nice, but his blue lipstick is ridiculous, and he insists on croaking out words as though he’s suffering from a nasty grog hangover. Both men are clearly paying the bills—the measly experience points to be had from jobs like this are only worth it for low-level acolytes like Whalin.
All (or at least some) of these problems could be forgiven if only the movie looked good, but it doesn’t. Oh, there are the requisite trap-laden dungeons (partly filmed in the catacomb-like sewers of Prague), and several of the game’s more notorious monsters, like orcs and beholders, appear as extras. But let’s face it: the dragons are the reason most people will want to see this movie, and they’re a huge disappointment. If the benchmark is still the scaly green fire-breather in 1981′s Dragonslayer, the wyrms in D&D don’t even come close. They have the disproportionate features and curious lack of solidity common to TV-grade computer animation. There are plenty of them, mind you, and the film’s single effective sequence is a spectacular aerial melee, high above the kingdom’s Gothic spires, that pits Savina’s army of friendly gold dragons against Profion’s evil-aligned reds. Too bad watching the rest of the movie is like sitting in the middle of a Stinking Cloud spell.
But enough of this. My task is completed. I can now return the Poison Pen +2 to its hiding place and hope that its power will be enough to dissuade anyone who comes across this document from seeing Dungeons & Dragons. Ironically, the film fails because it no longer requires what its namesake has always demanded in abundance, that strange and wonderful quality that’s still the best kind of magic we commoners have: imagination.
(0.5/4)