Humour makes a welcome return to the fantasy genre in the new Dungeons & Dragons film, which stars Chris Pine, Michelle Rodriguez and Regé-Jean Page. It’s sure to be a hit, writes Nicholas Barber.

Role-playing gamers have been addicted to Dungeons & Dragons for almost 50 years, but, up until now, it has only been made into one proper film, a turkey from 2000 that most people have sensibly forgotten. There are probably lots of complicated legal reasons why it’s taken 23 years for another Dungeons & Dungeons film to come along, but one issue could be that the game borrows a huge amount from JRR Tolkien’s novels, ie, it usually involves bands of elves, dwarves and humans going on quests and getting into fights. What that means is that any attempt to put Dungeons & Dragons on screen risks looking like a rip-off of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. What can the producers do that Peter Jackson hasn’t done already?

The answer turns out to be a simple one: they can be funny. Fantasy adventures might be getting ever more gloomy and portentous on television, but the producers of Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves have followed the Marvel Studios tactic of hiring comedy directors to make a blockbuster – in this case, Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley, the directors of Game Night (2018). The film they’ve made is a feelgood, family-friendly caper, which is not a description you can apply to HBO’s House of the Dragon or Amazon’s The Rings of Power.

Chris Pine stars as Edgin, a Han Solo / Rick Blaine type who used to be a doughty soldier, but became a cynical rogue after his beloved wife was killed. His sidekick is Holga (Michelle Rodriguez), a scowling barbarian who has fallen out with her tribe and separated from her husband (an amusing surprise cameo): this is one of the few Hollywood films in which the male and female leads come across as genuine, loyal, platonic friends.

In an opening scene that establishes the light-hearted mood, Edgin and Holga are in prison for “grand larceny and skulduggery”, but they hope to talk their way into a pardon from “The Council of Absolution” – or, failing that, they hope to jump out of a window. Once free, they travel to a city ruled by their old crony, Forge Fitzwilliam (Hugh Grant), only to find that he has teamed up with a wicked witch (Daisy Head), and turned Edgin’s daughter Kira (Chloe Coleman) against him. Determined to win back Kira, and to rob all the treasure that various visiting noblemen have stored in Forge’s magical vault, Edgin and Holga assemble a team of burglars who are almost as sweetly hapless as they are. There is Simon (Justice Smith), a sorcerer with self-esteem issues whose most impressive trick is to make himself “slightly blurry”. And there is Doric (Sophia Lillis), a woodland woman who can change into various animals, including an “owlbear”.

Rather than aiming for an epic odyssey, then, Goldstein and Daley opt for a bright, snappy heist movie modelled in part on Ocean’s Eleven, with a tongue-in-cheek approach to the supernatural that’s reminiscent of The Princess Bride and Ghostbusters. And the look of the film? Rather than labouring to make the clothing and architecture correspond to one particular historical period, the designers simply stick in whichever castles and costumes seem cool.

What’s welcome about the humour is that the directors, who also co-wrote the screenplay, haven’t been smug or snarky. It would have been easy for them to pepper their script with inside jokes about 12-sided dice and weighty rule books, or else to put in lots of winking references to present-day pop culture. Instead, the humour is silly and irreverent while being more-or-less sincere, and more-or-less invested in the reality of the world they’ve created.

It’s an attitude that’s embodied by Pine. It’s probably no coincidence that Goldstein and Daley’s previous film, the aforementioned Game Night, starred Jason Bateman, because Pine seems to have studied Bateman’s way of being unflappable, ironic, and just on the right side of smarmy, but still vulnerable enough for us to care about. But even if Edgin’s persona was pinched from Bateman, it fits Pine as snugly as his leather jacket: this, rather than Captain Kirk in Star Trek (2009) or Steve in Wonder Woman (2017), is the role that suits him best. Grant is even better as the slimy villain, a puffed-up clown who seems to have been inspired by certain senior British politicians.

DUNGEONS & DRAGONS: HONOUR AMONG THIEVES

Directors: Jonathan Goldstein, John Francis Daley

Cast: Chris Pine, Michelle Rodriguez, Hugh Grant, Regé-Jean Page

Run-time: 2hr 14m

Release date: 31 March in the US and UK

If the comic tone is skilfully judged, it’s clear that Goldstein and Daley didn’t concentrate quite so hard on other aspects of their film. The plot is so haphazard that viewers might struggle to say what the villains are hoping to achieve. They might also lose interest when the heroes go off on a wild goose chase in the middle, at which point Grant’s character is all but forgotten, and Regé-Jean Page pops in as a noble warrior, for no obvious reason except to get Bridgerton fans into the cinema. The cartoonish visual effects aren’t first-rate, either. In most contemporary fantasy, the CGI is so advanced that every last bristle on a monster’s hide looks tangibly real, whereas this film doesn’t convince you for a second that the characters are in an actual dungeon or facing an actual dragon. Presumably, the theory was that if viewers were smiling, they wouldn’t mind that they weren’t gasping or screaming.

It’s a theory that is just about vindicated. Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves is no masterpiece, but it’s warm, upbeat, unpretentious entertainment, and it’s bound to be popular. We certainly won’t have to wait another 23 years before the next Dungeons & Dragons film comes out.