Dungeons & Dragons

Reviewed by:
Eric Alt

There’s a simple recipe behind the creation of the new Dungeons & Dragons movie:

3 cups Star Wars
1 cup Indiana Jones
2 tbsp J.R.R. Tolkien
A light dusting of Out magazine
5 reject actors from WB

Combine ingredients in a bowl. Half-bake. Serve.

And you thought the game was awful? First of all, let us say how disappointed we were to find that Hank the Ranger, Presto the Magician, or the Dungeon Master don’t appear in this movie. Hell, we’d have taken Uni over what this movie gives us. Everything that isn’t ripped directly out of Star Wars (this movie plays like George Lucas Cliffs Notes, as if the original was all that tough to follow), is like taking mushrooms and going to a Renaissance Fair—only without the laughing and the pretty colors. Jeremy Irons’s villain chews so much scenery, he makes Darth Vader look like a Method actor. Poor Jeremy better play a troubled writer or a terminally ill doctor if he’s going to salvage any credibility. And his “henchman”—this guy wears purple glitter lipstick, shoulder pads, and Lee press-on nails—is about as scary as a prissy drag queen feigning PMS. Marlon Wayans seems determined to prove that the popularity of any Wayans brother has the shelf life of milk in direct sunlight. He’s friggin’ Jar Jar Binks, only—if you can believe it—more insipid, grating, and completely useless. All the inhabitants of this fantasy world are apparently from L.A., and there are tons of brilliant lines like, “You thieves are all the same—always taking things that don’t belong to you.” Unless you have a hankering to subject yourself to a half-assed, slightly brain-damaged Xena cast-off, avoid D&D like you’ve been avoiding all things D&D-related since the early ’80s.

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