Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves (2023)
It may have been a disappointment at the box office, but that doesn’t make Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves a bad movie. It’s certainly worth watching despite its failure to make a splash in theaters. Indeed, with no connections to the previous Dungeons & Dragons trilogy, Honor Among Thieves was wildly popular with critics who couldn’t have imagined it turning out to be such a terrific and funny reboot, and it still has fans crying out for a sequel today!
The filmmakers and cast do a phenomenal job of capturing all the larks of role-playing fantasy game characters, including a cheeky bard played by an energetic Chris Pine, Michelle Rodriguez as a tough barbarian who is tired of putting up with him, Justice Smith’s pining sorcerer, and Hugh Grant on fine form as a smarmy rogue.
With plenty of jokes and a heist structure that works for both the group and the story, Honor Among Thieves is a tremendously good time that puts the uniquely crap previous trilogy in the rearview and yells “hey, let’s have a great time!” It’s really unfortunate that not enough people wanted to play.
The Batman (2022)
Batman makes the list twice thanks to Matt Reeves’ 2022 reboot, The Batman, which not only had the unenviable task of trying something new after Christopher Nolan had impressed audiences with his own DC trilogy about the Caped Crusader, but also had to quickly follow Ben Affleck’s spin on the character from the DCEU’s muddled movies Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and Justice League, which the actor had suddenly stepped away from due to various issues.
Against all odds, The Batman successfully rebooted DC’s popular character yet again with a story about a younger Bruce Wayne, played by Robert Pattinson, whose real-life weirdness seemed to fit a stranger, more disconnected Wayne as he faced major comic-book villains in only his second year fighting crime in Gotham City. Colin Farrell’s hilarious Penguin juxtaposed nicely with Paul Dano’s squirrely, oddball villain, The Riddler, while the movie thoroughly embraced the noir detective angle of Bruce Wayne, rarely seen in previous live-action Batman movies.
Tense and visually impressive, Reeves certainly understood the assignment with The Batman, and while the film’s reliance on exposition occasionally got in the way of its pacing, it was largely viewed as an excellent reboot that probably would have been followed up with several sequels by now, had it not been for big changes behind the scenes at both Warner Bros. and DC.
