By Captain Supermarket
courtesy of Th3rd World Studios

I play a lot of D&D. There have been lulls in the experience, sure, but I’ve been playing the game in one form or another since I was seven years old. One evening, my current gaming group decided that I needed to see the Dungeons & Dragons movie that came out in 2000. I really don’t think there’s a saving throw that can protect you from it.

Tagline: This is no game.

More Accurate Tagline: This is no game. Games are fun.

Guilty Party: A lot of the blame should lie with the writers, Topper Lilien and Carroll Cartwright (partially because this shouldn’t have taken two people to write), but the real blame is with director Courtney Solomon. Apparently, he bought the rights at nineteen years old from TSR and spent the next ten years scraping the cash together for the movie. You have to wonder what would have happened had he spent some of the time actually writing a script.

Synopsis: Ridley (Justin Whalin) and Snails (Marlon Wayans) are a couple of thieves looking for one big score. And, since they’re in D&D, they happily call themselves thieves, loudly, repeatedly and in mixed company. Meanwhile, would-be tyrant Profion (Jeremy Irons) is plotting to control red dragons for the purpose of stealing the throne from Empress Savina (Thora Birch, clearly influenced by Natalie Portman’s comatose portrayal of Queen Amidala). Ridley and Snails break into the school for mages, and get caught by Marina (Zoe McClellan), a young wizard who is clearly supposed to be ugly because she wears glasses and has an unflattering updo. Profion’s minions, led by Damodar (who, for reasons never explained, wears bright blue lipstick), choose this moment to break into the same school to steal a scroll that will lead them to a rod that controls red dragons. Got it? Ridley, Snails and Marina get the scroll instead and decide to recover the artifact. I guess so that the villains can steal it from them in the third act. Whoops… spoiled the movie for you there. There’s a lot of running through sets that look left over from that two-parter of Angel where he went to the Host’s home dimension. Along the way, Ridley’s group hooks up with the world’s tallest dwarf and an elf with metal breasts. Snails gets killed because he’s the black guy, Ridley discovers he’s got a destiny because he’s the white guy, and Marina loses her glasses and lets her hair down because Hollywood thinks girls with glasses and managed hair are ugly. There’s a huge battle in which Ridley kills Damodar (whose name really sounds like “Dammit all”) and Savina kills Profion. So all’s well that ends well. Until the director dropped some acid and shot the end. More on that later.

Life-Changing Subtext: Only the monarchy can make us truly equal. Once again, you have an ostensibly pro-democracy movie that actually features a “rightful” monarch who just wants to make everyone equal. Really? Does that mean she’s going to clean her own damn palace?

Defining Quote: Damodar: “Just like you thieves, always taking things that don’t belong to you.” I really wish he’d continue the thought. “Just like you fighters, always fighting with people.” “Just like you paladins, always turning undead as a cleric three levels lower.” “Just like you scouts, always moving ten feet to get your skirmish bonus, but not against creatures without discernable anatomy, such as oozes or constructs.” I could do this all day.

Standout Performance: Jeremy Irons as lead bad guy Profion. Is it just me or does Profion sound like some new drug that will cure your night blindness but causes anal leakage, erectile dysfunction and death? Anyway, Irons acts like he’s getting paid by volume and hand gestures. I have to applaud him for at least showing up to work, but one hopes that it’s a one-time thing to get that summer home he’s had his eye on. I guess Eragon was for that pool he wanted added on.

What’s Wrong:Too often when movie like this is made from a product that has niche appeal, the producers take the base’s loyalty for granted and then do everything they can to make it appeal to a wider audience. The problem is when the movie completely loses what was appealing about the core product in the first place. The easiest way to do that is to ignore the trappings of the product that people like: in this case, the iconic classes, monsters, magic items and everything else that Gary Gygax stole from Tolkien. Not that being loyal would have done much good. It also bears noting that almost every scene in this movie is an adaptation of a better scene, usually in an Indiana Jones movie. It’s the cinematic equivalent of Linkin Park covering the Clash.

Flash of Competence: The nicest thing I can say is that if you’re going to steal, you might as well steal from Indiana Jones. Those are some good movies right there.

Best Jokes: Empress Savina enters, wearing a bizarre costume that makes her look like a combination of the Childlike Empress from Neverending Story and an anglerfish. Mrs. Supermarket: “Bastian, she needs a name!” Me: “I name you ‘Poor Man’s Natalie Portman.’”

Best Scenes: When Snails gets stabbed and dumped off a castle wall, everyone breathed a sigh of relief. God, he was annoying.

Transcendent Moment: After the big, climactic battle sequence, Ridley, Marina and their token elf and dwarf friends visit the grave of Snails. We’re all ready for Snails to get resurrected and annoy the shit out of us some more. Instead, the four living heroes transform into globes of light and fly off. I wish there were some way to explain it. It’s probably the second biggest “what the fuck?” ending of all time, right behind Takashi Miike’s surreal Dead or Alive.

If this movie destroyed cinematic high fantasy, I might be bitter. But a year later a little movie called The Fellowship of the Ring came out and put everything right. As far as I’m concerned, that’s the real D&D movie.