Even if it did lay it on a little to marvel-y with some of the jokes the action was good and I think it did the source material well. It was a delight to see my favorite D&D monsters in a movie, I pogged when the displacer beast showed up.
I expected a fantasy comedy-adventure using DnD IP. I did not expect so many jokes to feel like playing DnD. The super competent Paladin guy who was a stand-in for DMPCs was probably my favorite part.
I also really like how they depicted the spell component pouch. Makes a lot more sense than "I reach into the pouch and just happen to grab the right material components every time."
It was Pretty Fun, which is exactly what I wanted and expected from such a movie.
A lot of the jokes I felt were kind of predictable, like the end of the Speak With Dead scene, and the way the sense of humor was so modern it kind of took me out of the setting. I think you can do silly action-adventure and not have it kill the immersion (like Princess Bride or the blacksmith's shop fight in the first Pirates of the Caribbean). But there were a few times I did laugh, like when Michelle Rodriguez bit her lip at the halfling at the end. And I honestly thought the action was pretty subpar - a lot of the wire effects were pretty bad, and I don't really like CGI spectacles.
I give it 5/10, myself - I don't regret watching it, but I have no interest in watching it again, and kind of forgot it existed until this post reminded me of it.
If they do a sequel they need to bring back Jeremy Irons from the first atrocious DnD movie. He acted the hell out of that role.
I have to see that and I'd like a sequel. Movie is kind of set up for one.
I watched it on a rental vhs that had the text crawl every ten minutes saying "for promotional purposes only, not for rental or purchase" lmao it really was bad, so bad the video store didn't stock a real copy. We MST3K style roasted the shit out of it.
Jeremy Irons overacted so hard it boomerangs back to being a great performance
It's one of the few movies that I think really earns the title "so bad it's good." As the other person posted, Jeremy Irons' extreme overacting is easily the highlight of the film.
Fun enough movie, and one of the franchises I'm a bit of a sucker for. I'd watch a second one if they make it
