Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves

To: the makers of this film Fr: me Re: suggestions for improvements if you should get the insane idea to do another one of these I recently saw your attempt at a Dungeons & Dragons movie. From my research, I saw that while this got positive reviews, it was a box office failure, not even reaching the break-even point. Someone might get the idea that the reviews are a good sign to try again. I am by no means a D&D expert, but I have more than a passing familiarity with the property, so I'd like to think I can help you avoid the pitfalls that made this movie fail. #1: Don't cast Chris Pine. Hollywood has been trying to make fetch happen with this guy for years, and it keeps not happening because he's not authentic. He doesn't act, he portrays, as if he's the ACT-BOT 2000, and he's just been activated right before the scene is being filmed and has to be given the most basic programming on human emotion, but there's no time to debug. I've seen more genuine acting from the before person in a hemorrhoid cream commercial. If you want someone to pass as your leading man, you can't get a simulacrum of it and expect people to buy it as real. He's as artificial and unsatisfying as tofu. #2: Don't cast Michelle Rodriguez. She has only every done one role in her career, a cold hardcase, and somehow, she's still bad at it. Just like Pine, nothing about her clocks as genuine. Crossing your arms and looking constipated does not translate into toughness. A crematorium is colder than her. She doesn't show a coldness so much as a lack of feeling, an empty void where coldness should go but can't because nature has decided that today, vacuums are fine. To see her in a movie is to see a blank template with the words "badass goes here" written in crayon. I'm more intimidated by the kids at a fourth birthday party than I am by any character Michelle Rodriguez has ever played. #3: Don't ask Hugh Grant to be a bad guy and also ask him to do textbook Hugh Grant stuff. I'm not going to be intimidated by a guy whose defining characteristic is "charmingly befuddled". That can be used to disarm someone he's trying to win over, but the audience should be able to see the sinister manipulator just beneath. What I saw here was the guy from Music & Lyrics at the ren fair. #4: The secondary villain, the sorcerer. "She's bald and has tattoos" is pretty lazy character design. Plenty of women out there with body modifications and/or short or no hair. Doesn't make them evil just because they don't look like Margot Robbie. Goth is not a shortcut to evil. Let's not work in reductive stereotypes, mmkay? And her big plan ending in a literal inversion of the skybeam trope -- having it come down rather than go up -- is not clever. Not even remotely. Stop it. Do better. I'd say try harder, but that would imply you tried to begin with. #5: I don't know who told you rendering your CGI on a dying Atari Jaguar was a good idea, but it wasn't. I've seen more convincing, lifelike animation on The Flintstones. I could use MS Paint to insert myself into the raising of the flag at Iwo Jima and it would look more professional and refined than the first draft "CGI" you foisted on people here. #6: You ever been to the toy aisle in a dollar store? You know they have toys that obvious rip-offs of famous IP's, but tweaked just enough to avoid copyright attorneys? Major Patriot instead of Captain America, Cyborg Officer instead of Robocop, things like that. Well, maybe don't hire the people who do create those to write your script, because only the blind couldn't see the words Protectors Of The Universe and Revengers written all over this. The MCU group formula is not a carbon copy that can be applied to any script. It takes a number of elements working together -- unique characters, those characters having unique voices, those unique voices saying lines that are appropriate to them and no one else in the group, chemistry between the leads, and knowing the time and place for wisecracks and character development. This script, a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy, did none of that. It was filled with crude sketches from concepts the writers clearly didn't understand and expected to work. It's like dumping a trash bag full of scrap metal into the engine compartment of a car and expecting it to start. Make your own characters, don't just copy someone else's, scribble out the names, and say the assignment is done. Forest-Lord, Damora, Plantis, and Sploot aren't good enough. #7: This relates to #6, but I think it's separate enough to warrant its own call-out. Do you know what "anachronistic" means? No, of course you don't, you made Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, you have the IQ of a toilet at Lollapalooza. See, anachronistic is when you have an element that doesn't fit in its surroundings. Someone today riding a penny farthing bicycle would be a good example. Or the Mongol hordes using rifles. Or the language in this movie. If you want your fantasy world to draw people in and feel immersive, they can't talk like a Paul Feig script. It makes viewers keenly aware that they are watching people acting in a movie instead of bringing a world to life. The characters in the Lord Of The Rings movies feel authentic because they speak in a form of English that's just familiar enough for us to recognize, but just distinct enough to feel like its from an ancient, bygone realm. I've heard more appropriate conversation for a fantasy world standing in line at 7-11 to buy a Slurpee than I did in this movie. You don't need to bury the script in thee's and thou's, but good lord, try a little harder to not make it sound like chatter I'd hear at the company picnic. #8: If Stranger Things and reboot sequels have taught us anything, it's that catering to the hardcores and relying on member-berries is insulting, lazy, and displays a creative mind devoid of creativity. I bring this up because you seemed to think having the Dungeons & Dragons license meant shoving a reference to the source material every four seconds was a good idea, and trust me, it wasn't. WE KNOW IT'S A DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS MOVIE, IT'S IN THE DAMNED TITLE. You didn't use it to your advantage, you used it as a cheat code to have a ready-made setting that you had to invest no time in whatsoever to actually feel alive. References disguised as lore-dumping is not the same as world-building. Saying out loud everybody's character class and having the magic users call out their spells like players do and all the other references to the game is jarring, my wife, who has never played or even cracked open a D&D book in her life, was exhausted and annoyed by it. I kept expecting the movie to stop and everybody roll dice, to the point where I was legitimately concerned this movie would end with the reveal it was some friends in a basement and this was a visualization of their quest. The fusillade of references only serves to stop the script in its tracks so the audience that has played the game can recognize you mentioned a thing, while killing the momentum for those who haven't as they sit there and wonder why the hell this thing had to be shown or mentioned. Reading the source material is not the same as understanding it, and it sure as hell isn't the same as knowing how to build a world within it. More, it shows that you didn't have an original idea whatsoever when it came to this movie; you just thought "Guardians, but with dragons and castles!", and you used the notes in the margins you made as the entire script, and you bought the D&D license to fill in the blanks. I can't promise that following these suggestions will guarantee box office success. I don't know that the D&D license will ever have that pop culture penetration that'll pull in the casuals. But I can guarantee that by following my suggestions, you'll at least manage to avoid all the rakes you managed to step on making this turd parade. I'd say I'm happy to help, but I had to endure this movie to bring you this help, and I had to pay for the streaming service for the "privilege" of seeing this insult to entertainment. Somehow, I feel like I rolled more of a critical failure here than you did.