 Dungeons & Dragons (2000) Anyway, it has been rare indeed that I have seen a film strive so hard to be Star Wars only to end up being The Apple. A movie in which literally every actor is laughably bad; it is only a matter of to what degree. Dungeons & Dragons could justifiably end the careers of everyone involved, and still it would not seem as though justice had been done. It's the type of film where laughter is truly the only defense, although I suppose sorcery would be an acceptable alternative (and one that 95% of the target audience is probably capable of, at least in their own frail, Fritos-addled minds). All that said, I enjoyed it immensely. I had great fun in between all the wincing. The plot centers around four improbably thrown together hero types (the mage, the thief, the Negro thief, and the grumbling dwarf) in a scheme to retrieve some kind of mystical scepter in order to help the Empress (Thora Birch) defeat her adversary, Jeremy Irons (playing himself). The foursome is pursued by the desperately un-menacing Bruce Payne (whose primary scare tactic, aside from some ill-advised Goth lipstick, seems to be speaking extremely slowly), and manages to go through all manner of adventure along the way. Of course all this is pure malarkey designed specifically to allow for cool special effects and exciting action sequences. There are some of those, but they are so hampered by the truly horrendous acting all around that it's difficult to give in for even one moment and start to care one way or the other about this stupid film. Justin Whalin (the thief) must certainly be one of the all-time lamest choices for a leading man ever. Nothing good can be said about him. Every moment that he is onscreen is a pitiful miscarriage of the cinema's potential to entertain and edify. His main acting chops seem to be wincing and smirking, which were also my main audience chops while watching him, so maybe it all balances out. What a different and vastly better movie this could have been if only they had cast Will Friedle in Whalin's role. Zoe McLellan (the mage) is about as subtle as Kimmy from "Full House," and I'm talking the early seasons. Her main technique seems to be: "Look surprised!" Marlon Wayons (the Negro thief) is clearly tossed in here to give the movie some much needed hipness … perhaps the studio marketers wanted some potential for drawing a black crowd in to see this lilywhite movie. Wayans is fine with his typical shtick, but it's as anachronistic as can be in this context. The low point of the film comes at a funeral for Wayans's character, who is told he died for a good cause, because the war was all about making all people equal. They were definitely going for some symbolic nod to slavery in the US, and you know what? Dungeons & Dragons is not the best context for that kind of statement. Did I mention how bad Bruce Payne was? Jeremy Irons is possibly worse. He gets some of those scenes where the crazed tyrant makes all sorts of wild hand gestures and overly confident belly laughs. Just terrible. He's usually over the top to begin with, so you might imagine how far he goes with this one … all the way to the bank, that is. Thora Birch is 100% ridiculous in every frame that she appears in, woefully miscast in a role that required more than the mere memorization of badly written lines (she barely even phones this one in). It seems that she was cast in an attempt to get some kind of Natalie Portman-esque magic going, but dear sir, I knew Queen Amidala, and Birch is no Queen Amidala. She is virtually no different here than she was in Now & Then, except in this one she's bedecked in hideous costumes, one of which makes her look nauseatingly like the "Zombie"-era Dolores O'Riordan from the Cranberries. There is a monster at one point in the film that looks just like a Madball. Stop it, you're scaring me! Sadly there were no subsequent monsters that looked like, say, Wacky Packages or Garbage Pail Kids. Richard O'Brien (Riff Raff from Rocky Horror) actually gets a nice cameo, but he's about all that can be marked up in the "good" column. Some of the CGI stuff is good too, I suppose, and I guess it's almost always nice to see dragons flying around. The saddest thing about Dungeons & Dragons isn't so much that it wants to be Star Wars, it's that it wants to be Star Wars – The Phantom Menace. That's like not bothering to idolize Chachi Arcola, but instead going straight for Spike Fonzarelli … it's like, hey, don't sell yourself so short, what are you, depressed? The parallels are many and increasingly pathetic: Thora Birch's Queen Amidala-like character; Jeremy Irons's Senator Palpatine-like character; the very lame take on the intergalactic senate (here it's basically an underpopulated opera house); the Darth Vader/Maul Bruce Payne character (literally given a musical motif in the score that rips off the "Imperial March"); the Endor/Gungan City type animated city that the characters find themselves in shortly before the big climax; the swordfight that is a barely veiled lightsaber duel (the swords even spark alternately blue and red when they strike each other); need I continue? It's just pure shit, a preposterous movie from start to finish. That is, from five minutes after the start to finish. We came five minutes late and therefore missed whatever brilliance actually sets up the damn thing. Incidentally, there was only one other person when we came in, and he was gone by the time the lights came up. Hopefully he was not a D&D diehard who was embarrassed by our blatant laughter. And while I'm thinking about it … what's with making a movie about "Dungeons & Dragons" in 2000, anyway? And trying to make it cool? Yikes. Can't wait for the sequel.
Review by Running Bear |