The Dungeons & Dragons movie (the first one)
The Dungeons & Dragons movie
OK, the sound man should be flogged — I couldn’t understand a word in either the beginning or ending segments with the dragons — and the script needed to be something beyond a first draft, with recognizable motivations, less exposition and decent dialogue added. And someone wake Thora Birch up: She seems to have slipped into some sort of sleepwalking coma.
Having said that, the Dungeons & Dragons movie wasn’t as horrible as I’d heard it made out to be. It was surely better than Krull or The Sword and the Sorcerer. I’d rank it right below Willow and around the level of Dragonheart: amateurish, kind of cheesy, but not offensively so.
There was some neat stuff in the movie. Well, neatish. Many of the characters, most notably Ridley certainly looked the part, and the computer-generated capital city was pretty excellent in all the pointlessly fast flyby shots. And I thought the dungeon sequences were handled reasonably well.
Courtney Solomon put Dungeons & Dragons together without the benefit of a real grounding in film, other than “parents in the film industry,” which qualifies him to work at Starbucks, honestly. And it shows. But the film, if clumsy, also shows a real love of the source material that redeems most of its flaws.
You want to see a really bad fantasy movie? Check out First Knight. Compared to that, this is Shakespeare.
Worth renting for families looking for light entertainment, and maybe owning for someone REALLY passionate about the Dungeons & Dragons game.
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