After their last film in Game Night, with its story all about role-playing games and how revealing they can be for the personalities of those playing them, writer/directors Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley are now going after the biggest name when it comes to RPGs: Dungeons & Dragons. The extent to which these guys have advanced since the days of Horrible Bosses and Vacation only grows more staggering with each passing release (even if our last check-in with the duo, Vacation Friends, was not that great), and since I’ve actually gotten into a bit of dice-rolling recently, I was doubly excited to see what they had cooked up (all while trying not to let D&D owner Wizards Of The Coast themselves become cooked over the Open Game License fiasco that would’ve caused trouble for a lot of content creators and fans alike).
Now, my own experience with D&D is rather limited; I only have a handful of actual game sessions to my name, and quite a few character sheets and backstories that likely won’t get used, but never say never (the story must be told of Hughal Dughal, the Dwarven pro-wrestler monk). But between those sessions, the nights spent brainstorming backstories, my general interest in video game RPGs like the Elder Scrolls series, and from watching liveplays of groups like Critical Role, I’d like to think I have a good enough idea of what makes this specific IP, and indeed tabletop RPGs in general, appealing. And it looks like Goldstein and Daley have nailed it.
For a start, their writing (an aspect of Game Night I didn’t give nearly enough due credit to, as I learned after my initial review that it was largely rewritten by Goldstein and Daley themselves) perfectly encapsulates the sense of size and scale that a fantastical setting like the Forgotten Realms should evoke. They and co-writer Michael Gilio pull the same trick that Derek Kolstad did with the John Wick series, where the dialogue refers to all manner of events pre-film and locales that may or may not get shown on-screen but, because the details are given so naturally, it’s easy to imagine them as part of this larger world. Indeed, Barry Peterson’s cinematography does its best to channel Peter Jackson’s Tolkien films in showing wide open spaces and densely-detailed interiors to bulk up that world-building.
The characters are also a big part of that appeal. While the casting on its own is pitch-perfect (Michelle Rodriguez as an axe-wielding barbarian, Hugh Grant as a slimy and cunning rogue, Chris Pine as a gobby bard), their banter and indeed their way of carrying out the story fits with the franchise’s core aesthetics as well. Their respective backstories, both as shown and as told through the dialogue, again add to the largeness of the world the main story takes place in. And the way that they carry out their trips into darkened dungeons, ever-shifting mazes, forgotten battlefields carrying the dead, and especially the castle heist that makes up the bulk of the narrative, are all presented with almost an improvisational tone, like these characters are genuinely just making it all up as they go. As someone who, in their third-ever session, had to figure out how to calm down a gnome child after my kid brother kept trying to fire arrows at her, I can attest to how accurate that sensation is.
And through that, it taps into a similar sense of camaraderie as something like Legend Of Vox Machina, where the characters are both engaging and worth caring about when good and bad things happen to them, but without being bogged down by the sense that, because it has its emotional moments, it all must be taken absolutely seriously. Instead, there’s a light and pervasively fun atmosphere that keeps its over-two-hour run time feeling as breezy as a Georges Méliès short, while still doing justice to the bard’s want to see his wife and daughter again, the sorcerer’s crippling self-doubt, the druid’s gradual warming up to being around humans, and even the paladin’s silly yet earnest embodiment of Lawful Good.
As much as I could keep going on about how impressed I am by the writing here, or how resonant the performances are, or even wanting to see if I can bring my Dragonborn Paladin out of retirement (his name’s Da-Bu-Di, because he is blue and I easily amuse myself), the main reason why this works is because it is purely entertaining. My weakness for genre-weird heist stories a la Army Of The Dead and Avengers: Endgame notwithstanding, this is a fantasy adventure that feels like the product of people who, above all else, wanted to have fun, which is about as to-the-letter as you can get for something attached to the legacy of Dungeons & Dragons. Let’s just hope that the owners of said legacy can stop themselves from letting their own thirst for loot get in the way of the good thing they already have.
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