Benjamin
Charles Maydon
Review
Film: Dungeons
and Dragons
Director:
Courtney Solomon
[From local magazine Pooka Times, March-April issue, 2001]
There are some films in this
world that reach out and touch you in special ways; they can be truly amazing,
captivating you for hours on end, or have little sparkly bits which make you
smile with contentment when you remember them. Fantasy, in itself, is a genre
which often manages to achieve this effect given the dextrous, go-anywhere
freedom of the plot of an otherworldly epic as - after all - it doesn't have to
be realistic.
At the other end of the
spectrum, there are films which reach out and touch you in entirely the wrong
way. Films that not only warrant a walking-out, but perhaps a health warning,
maybe a ban, and most probably a submission to Mystery Science Theater 3000. It is a sort of tragedy that these
films exist, but they do, and when it's a film with potential, this fact can be
worse, pushing the film even deeper into the box marked 'bad movie'.
Unfortunately, Dungeons and Dragons falls into this
category perfectly.
Based (so it claims) on the
popular board game which has become a cult, Dungeons
and Dragons is set... somewhere. I'm not sure where entirely; it's
unspecified as to exactly where this is, but it's a land which has got magic in
it. We know this because the film starts off with an evil sorcerer doing
something-or-another with slaves (again, it's not specified as to what
significance this has to the plot, if there is one), followed by the two main
characters breaking into a Magic School... sorry, "magicschool".
American accents are okay when used properly, but this one is teeth-grindingly
irritating.
Overlooking the obvious lack
of a plot and/or decent acting, the viewer can learn to appreciate the stark
similarities to the board game which the billing for the film promises. The two
main characters - Ritley, and Snails (don't ask) – are thieves. There's a dwarf
in it, an elf, and some wizards. There the similarity ends. Oh, and there are
some dungeons too (they're plastic, by the way). And some dragons. They're also
plastic. And there's a Staff of Red Dragon Control which still has the lines on
it where it's been ripped from the sprue.
I tried to like this film, I
really did. I tried to appreciate that in the hands of another director, or
capable actors, this film might have been mildly amusing (even though the
film's only comic character is killed off half-way through, completely
gratuitously I might add) and maybe even entertaining; I tried to make sense of
the, erm... 'plot' with an open mind and vainly hope that everything would be
explained at the end, and I tried to laugh at the hideously un-funny one-liners
without an open and willing urge to crawl under my chair and die, but I found
out all these tasks were impossible in an all-too-graphic fashion.
It's a real shame that Dungeons and Dragons had to be like
this. There are some impressive special effects, cameos from legends like
Richard O'Brien and Jeremy Irons, and some scenes that do hold out some hope of
being genuinely clever or exciting. But these factors just don't hold up a
pathetically weak story which is not aided by the lead actors at all, net
result of which being that this film is an absolute atrocity, something which
disappoints in every single area and even swings dangerously close to parodying
the very board game it is attempting to emulate.
Text & Site © Benjamin Charles Maydon
2011