Edgin to risen corpse: "Were you killed in battle?"
Corpse: "Yes."
Edgin: "Great! (to Simon) Four more questions, right?"
Corpse: "Yes."
Edgin: "No, no, no, that wasn't for you. (to Simon) Did that count as a question?"
Corpse: "Yes."
Edgin: "Dammit! Only answer when I talk to you, okay?"
Corpse: "Yes."
Simon: "Why did you say 'okay?' at the end of that?"
Corpse: "I didn't." (thunk)
Edgin: "Fantastic."
American action-comedy fantasy film, released in 2023. It was directed by Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley, with a screenplay by Goldstein, Daley, and Michael Gilio, based on a story by Gilio and Chris McKay -- and also based on the tabletop roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons. The stars included:
The plot: Edgin is a former member of the peacekeeping Harpers until his wife is murdered by followers of the Red Wizards, an order of evil spellcasters. He tries to make a new life for himself and his daughter and joins a team of thieves, including Holga, Simon, and Forge -- and Forge's mysterious friend Sofina. Edgin and Holga are captured while trying to steal a Tablet of Reawakening to resurrect his wife, and the two of them are imprisoned in a brutal arctic prison. They make a daring escape two years later, unaware that they had been pardoned, and make their way to the city of Neverwinter, where Forge has taken over as ruler.
Forge has been taking care of Kira, Edgin's daughter, but he and Sofina have also convinced her that Edgin deserted her and does not love her. Edgin and Holga also learn that Sofina is actually one of the diabolical Red Wizards, that she and Forge engineered their imprisonment, and that they have something terrible in mind for Neverwinter during the upcoming High Sun Games. Edgin and Holga escape and decide to rob Forge's vault during the games and to get Kira to freedom.
At this point, things get complicated. They decide to recruit a proper crew for the heist, including their former associate Simon, who has little confidence in his magical abilities, and Doric, a druid who specializes in shapeshifting herself into various animals. Doric infiltrates Forge's castle and learns that the vault is protected by powerful magical defenses. Simon suggests trying to find an old magical relic, called the Helm of Disjunction, that could shut down any enchantments placed on the vault -- but no one knows where it is. The team travels to an old battlefield graveyard where the Helm was once seen, where they use another magical item to briefly resurrect the dead soldiers to quiz them on the Helm's location. This leads them to the paladin Xenk.
Xenk leads the team into the cavernous Underdark to find the Helm -- and once they find it, he effortlessly fights off a bunch of Sofina's assassins. And then everyone has to flee from Themberchaud, an obese red dragon who wants to eat everyone. Once they make their escape, Xenk says his farewells -- but Simon isn't able to master the Helm's powers, and the team hits on another much more convoluted plan to sneak into the vault using a teleportation portal hidden inside a painting stashed among Forge's treasures. As it turns out, both of their plans work almost perfectly -- and it still leads to everyone getting captured and being forced to compete in a gladiatorial labyrinth against mimics, displacer beasts, gelatinous cubes -- and even the adventuring team from the 1980s "Dungeons & Dragons" cartoon.
Finally, finally, the team makes their escape from the arena, gets Kira back, and even steals Forge's ill-gotten treasures -- and then they learn that Sofina has a plan to kill everyone attending the High Sun Games and raise them as her undead army! Can Edgin and his team save everyone in Neverwinter and stop Sofina's evil? Perhaps -- but the cost may be more than anyone wants to pay...
Holga: "That is one pudgy dragon."
Xenk: "It's Themberchaud! He must've found a new den!"
Edgin: "Did he eat the last one?"
So, with all that wild plot out of the way -- how was the movie? Well, I'm not going to tell you it's high art. It's absolutely a popcorn movie, no more, no less. It's there to knock your block off with action sequences, make you laugh at multiple jokes, and to give the D&D nerds plenty of in-jokes and fanservice to cheer over. It won't win Oscars -- but it's fun to watch with a bunch of friends, whether or not they play D&D.
D&D fans have suffered through a long, long period of ridiculously bad D&D movies -- badly made, poorly acted, self-important snoozefests. And the filmmakers, to their credit, realized half the fun of playing D&D was playing your way through humiliating critical failures, working your way through impossibly complex schemes because you missed the GM trying to get you to take the easy solution instead, and getting attacked by a cockatrice and immediately spending ten minutes making cock jokes. So we get Simon rolling badly on his Counterspells, the group trying to smuggle a tricked-out painting into a heavily guarded coach with a teleportation staff, and the team struggling to interrogate dead people. But they also get to be heroes, too -- Holga and Xenk are both brilliant fighters, Doric's shapeshifting is always jaw-droppingly amazing, Simon eventually gets over his performance issues and turns into a master spell-slinger, and Edgin may act like a chucklefuck, but he effortlessly cooks up scheme after scheme after scheme, and he also spends the entire movie fulfilling the chief job requirement of a bard -- he inspires his comrades.
The movie has great characterization all around, aside from Doric, who mostly starts out as an intense, hypercompetent shapeshifter and doesn't really change much by the end of the movie. And it's lots of fun to see all the D&D easter eggs the movie offers up. Neverwinter and the Underdark are settings, we meet owlbears, intellect devourers, rust monsters, and more, and we see spells cast like Time Stop, Bigby's Hand, Meteor Swarm, and Speak with Dead. And every plot hole and error in the movie can be reinterpreted as something happening in a particularly freewheeling D&D session. Why does a random mundane staff just happen to be the "Hither-Thither Staff," capable of creating teleportation portals? Because the player characters absolutely fucked up the GM's intricately devised puzzle-trap on the bridge, and he needed to invent something on the fly they could use to obtain the necessary McGuffin.
Is it a perfect movie? Oh my god, it is not. Is it fun anyway? Especially for fans of Dungeons & Dragons who are willing to suspend their disbelief to enjoy a funny, action-packed heist movie and love letter to their favorite RPG? Yeah, it probably is. Check it out, press Play -- and roll for initiative.
Sofina: "YOU KNOW NOT THE SCOPE OF MY POWER!"
Edgin's lute: (bonk!)