Game Knights: “Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves,” “A Thousand & One,” and “A Good Person”

DUNGEONS & DRAGONS: HONOR AMONG THIEVES

A few months back, an older friend who won't pay to see superhero movies asked me why I thought Marvel films have proven so colossally popular regardless of quality, and why, over the nearly 15 years since Iron Man's premiere, people still didn't seem remotely tired of them. I suggested that it was probably because the MCU traditionally provides – or at least promises – everything that audiences go to the movies for, and in one two-hour-ish package, to boot.

Enter any Marvel Studios outing, and you know there'll be action. There will be clear distinctions between good and evil. There will be visual effects to theoretically justify your ticket price. There will be laughs, though not so many that they derail the inherent seriousness. More often than not, there will be romance, though not enough to upset patrons who find kissing gross. There will be tragedy, though not so much that you leave in a bummer mood … unless it's Avengers: Infinity War. (Unlike a certain Daniel Day-Lewis title I could mention, there will not be blood, apart from strategically positioned forehead gashes.) And given that the Fast & the Furious franchise has become almost as influential as the MCU, you can rest assured that it'll all be about family, with our heroes and villains bonded by either genetics (see the Black Panthers, the Thors, the Ant-Mans … ) or a deeply devoted clan of work allies. (See The Avengers, Guardians of the Galaxy, Eternals … . Well, don't see Eternals.) Yet despite their reputation as one-stop-shopping for the entirety of the cinematic experience, Marvel movies, even the good ones, tend to drive some of us a little batty, because there's so much relentless sameness in the recipe that you can easily grow bored even while you're having fun. It's the same reason no one raves about their meal at McDonald's even after they've been desperately craving McDonald's. You know exactly what it's gonna taste like, you consume it, and you instantly forget about it.

This may seem like an awfully long-winded setup to discussion of Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, especially considering that this comedic, effects-driven adventure isn't remotely connected to the MCU. Except it so is, because you sense the Marvel template in every fiber of the film's shrewdly calculated being. I didn't come close to hating the movie, and thanks to writer/directors Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley and their topnotch cast, I did laugh a lot, particularly during the first half. But as we careened into hour two and beyond, it was still all I could do to keep my eyes open – and not, as I initially feared, because the proceedings proved too confounding and fan-centric for a viewer who had never played D&D in his life. Even though I couldn't define “paladin” or “druid” to save my soul, I had no difficulty following the storyline. That was kind of the problem. Though based on a role-playing game and not a comic book, it felt like practically every Marvel storyline I'd been following since 2008.

In true Avengers/Guardians fashion, Honor Among Thieves concerns a crew of rebels with one defining power – or lack thereof – apiece. The barbarian Holga (Michelle Rodriguez) is a fierce warrior. The half-elf Simon (Justice Smith) is a sorcerer, albeit a mostly lackluster one. The druid Doric (Sophia Lillis) can shape-shift into birds or beasts at will. And the team leader Edgin (Chris Pine)? He's a lute-playing bard who's the self-proclaimed “planner” of the group, meaning he generally comes up with ideas for rescue attempts and heirloom robberies that don't work. Keeping the movie's complicated saga deliberately simple, this motley quartet is united in their quests to save Edgin's daughter Kira (Chloe Coleman) from the clutches of the mendacious turncoat Forge Fitzwilliam (Hugh Grant) and save the kingdom from the evil wizard (Daisy Head) who wants to, I don't know, own the world or something. (While the narrative was fully comprehensible, I may have missed a few salient details.) Nothing terribly original there. The major kick of the film, however, comes from its vast bevy of goofy throwaway conceits – sequences that have little to do with the central dilemmas, and everything to do with Goldstein's and Daley's gifts for sardonic hilarity and expert comic staging.

It feels both ironic and wonderfully inevitable that the writer/directors would follow their 2018 Game Night with a Dungeons & Dragons movie. (Those feelings are no doubt intensified for we Freaks & Geeks fans who remember Daley's Sam Weir, in the series' final episode, introducing James Franco's Daniel Desario to the dice-rolling thrills of D&D.) The chief surprise of Goldstein's and Daley's new outing, which they co-wrote with Michael Gilio, is that it's frequently as funny as Game Night – and Game Night is one of the funniest films of the last 10 years. With the wisecracks and sarcastic asides in the first hour flying at a speedy clip, there are plenty of juicy lines for Pine, Rodriguez, Grant, and the revelatory Smith, who has never before demonstrated such superb timing or such a knack for riotously self-deprecating humor. (The Orange County native also nails Simon's British accent so effectively that I had to jump on Wikipedia to see if Smith was, in fact, British.)

Happily, though, the giggles don't end with the punchlines. Although the scene comes dangerously close to pilfering the entire premise of TV's Pushing Daisies, there's a mordantly ticklish routine in which Simon momentarily reawakens a decomposed corpse in order to glean information – and then, not getting the info the team needs, has to reawaken another, and another, and another. The bridge that collapses over an ocean of molten lava was good for some chuckles – our heroes' subsequent attack plan didn't remind me of D&D, but did bring back fond memories of Chutes & Ladders – and there are terrific bits involving a time-stop spell and a pitiable creature named Chancellor Jarnathan. Yet Goldstein and Daley are also among very few current directors of film comedies who also know how to tell a joke visually. In Game Night, Billy Magnussen's ver-r-ry slow bribery attempt slays me every time I see it, because Goldstein and Daley knew precisely where to position their camera for maximum amusement. Here, their visual coup de grâce lands with the graceful exit of paladin Xenk Yendar (portrayed, with priceless humorlessness, by Regé-Jean Page), who won't let a massive boulder get in the way of him walking a perfectly straight line.

Doesn't this sound like fun? It absolutely is, and had Honor Among Thieves been content to stay a nutty-ass comedy from beginning to end, it might have emerged as a modern slapstick classic – Monty Python & the Holy Grail with a super-size budget. (That resurrecting-the-dead segment is certainly reminiscent of Python in its prime.) But Hollywood studios don't make slapstick classics anymore. They make Marvel movies. And so, naturally, it's not enough for Pine's Edgin to be a fast-talking scoundrel; he has to be a fast-talking scoundrel with feelings, guilt-ridden over the death of his wife and lamenting the absence of his daughter. Rodriguez's Holga can't simply kick ass; she has to mend her broken heart following a painful divorce. (An unexpected, multi-Oscar-nominated guest star plays Holga's ex, and weirdly, their brief reunion is played solely for drama – and ineffective drama, considering the actors probably didn't even make eye contact when their individual performances were shot.) The effects-driven fight sequences, as in most Marvels, are blandly choreographed and go on forever. The humor dries up for nearly the whole last half-hour. Logic is sacrificed in favor of time-killing peril. (Why does Doric require saving when she's dangling off the edge of a cliff? Can't she, you know, just turn into a bird and fly away from danger?)

Most depressingly, at its climax, Goldstein's and Daley's adventure traffics in the single-most overused and infuriating cliché in the Marvel – and DC, and Disney – canon, delivering a tremendous show of sadness by killing off a major character only to have said figure, with maddening predictability, magically return to life. After so many years, I know I shouldn't still be enraged by this practice of blatantly toying with audiences' emotions in this manner; it's not like Spielberg didn't pull the same fast one in E.T. But while Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves was slavishly, exhaustively following the current blockbuster blueprint, it would have been nice if, as so rarely happens in these things, dead actually stayed dead. Not counting Simon's reanimated corpses, of course. Those things are a gas.

A THOUSAND & ONE

As it's one of the absolute best Best Pictures in Academy Awards history, more films should inspire comparisons to Moonlight – though in the case of writer/director A.V. Rockwell's A Thousand & One, such a correlation might seem reductive, if not racially insensitive and downright insulting. After all, must every movie about the struggles of largely impoverished Black families be asked to stand toe to toe with Barry Jenkins' 2016 masterpiece? But I make the comparison not simply because, just like Moonlight, this low-budget drama follows a young African American male through three iterations – and three separate actors – as a youth, a young teen, and a young man, and also gives him a loving yet deeply troubled mother and a father figure who dispenses worldly advice and vanishes too soon. I make it because, also just like Moonlight, this gorgeously detailed, emotionally devastating work waylaid me like few 21st-century films have, delivering a small-scale story with universal breadth and thoughtful, unaffected prose that rings with poetry. Rockwell's sublimely rich first feature also won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival this past January – a citation that, in recent years, has gone to lighter, more inherently feel-good fare such as CODA, Minari, and Me & Earl & the Dying Girl. How this blunt and beautiful miracle slipped through, I'll never know. But I ain't complaining.

Following a year-and-a-half stint at Rikers Island, 22-year-old hair stylist Inez de la Paz (singer/choreographer Teyana Taylor, in an extraordinary screen-lead debut) is on the New York City streets of 1994 looking for employment and a place to live when she spots six-year-old Terry (Aaron Kingsley Adetola), her child who was taken into foster care following her imprisonment. When she reintroduces herself, Terry barely looks at his mother, and Inez leaves the sullen, anxious boy with a handful of change and unreciprocated words of love. Yet when, not long after, Inez learns that Terry has been hospitalized after jumping from a window to escape his foster home, she visits her child, and after some coercion – and the gift of some Power Ranger action figures – she convinces him to simply walk out of the hospital together, promising that they'll never be parted again. So begins A Thousand & One, with the remainder of the film devoted to Inez and Terry attempting to start a new life together in Harlem, while also trying to stay one step ahead of the authorities who would surely consider this a kidnapping.

In the first of many, many unexpected narrative developments, though, no authorities appear interested in Terry's abduction from the hospital – a subtle indictment of the horrifying ease, at least in New York in the mid-'90s, with which certain denizens could fall through the cracks. And as A Thousand & One continues, and the time period shifts first to 2001 and then to 2005, you realize that Rockwell's indictment is of the city as a whole throughout its entire recent history, exemplified by the gentrification of Harlem as neighborhoods are demolished and “improvements” to long-standing apartment buildings lead to their tenants' evictions.

Rockwell pulls off a number of startling, intensely satisfying acts of misdirection in her film: introducing Inez's lover Lucky (a spectacular Will Catlett) as a potential menace who turns out to be a deeply loving, if deeply complicated, partner; keeping alive the threat of Inez's recidivism despite her initial promises to Terry proving to be true. Even our expectations regarding the forwarding in time are upended, because while most viewers will feel an immediate tightening in their guts when the title card “2001” appears on-screen, at no point in this NYC-set tale are the 9/11 attacks ever referenced. But while the movie is fiercely focused on Inez and Terry, its biggest surprise may be that it's not just about Inez and Terry, the same way that Moonlight wasn't just about Chiron. It's about America, or at least the numerous ways that Americans support and fail other Americans, and the enticing, oftentimes thwarted hopefulness of the American dream. You may not be an Inez or a Terry. But at some point, almost without question, you've most assuredly felt like them.

I can't fathom how I could've loved this more more than I do. When Aven Courtney took over the role of Terry for the 2001 sequences, I was both relieved and disappointed; relieved because I wasn't sure if my emotions could take another minute of Aaron Kingsley Adetola's heartbreaking naturalism, and disappointed because of how much I knew I'd miss him. But Courtney is equally transcendent (if not allowed to be quite as varied) as the 13-year-old Terry, and in the kid's 17-year-old state, Josiah Cross is utterly shattering, his late-film confrontations with his mother – who hasn't shared with him key pieces of her son's history – forcing me into that rare cineplex activity where you basically have to do seated stomach crunches to keep from audibly sobbing. Eric K. Yue's cinematography seems to capture every contradictory visual attribute of urban New York – the lush, colorful life as well as the just-above-poverty squalor – while composer Gary Gunn's ravishing score suggests not merely Moonlight's Nicholas Bridell, but Terence Blanchard and Aaron Copland, too.

And I'm not sure there are enough words to adequately praise Teyana Taylor, who at no point appears to beg for our sympathy, and definitely not our pity. Instead, what she and Rockwell ask for is compassion, as well as mere understanding – for what drives Inez to make the sometimes questionable choices she does; for how determinedly she seeks a better life for her child; for her forgiveness of other people's failings in conjunction with her own. Taylor's is a glorious, expansive, overwhelming performance in a movie that totally deserves its lead, and vice versa, and if I haven't yet precisely gleaned why the film is titled A Thousand & One, that's all right. It already stands for the number of times I'd be willing to re-watch this marvel just to figure it out.

A GOOD PERSON

Don't you love misleading trailers? Well, not the trailers themselves so much as the realization, after you've seen the movies being previewed, of just how misleading their trailers were? When I got my first three-minute taste of Zach Braff's A Good Person, I was both jazzed, because it starred Florence Pugh and Morgan Freeman, and deeply fearful, because it seemed to fall all-too-neatly into its creator's traditional wheelhouse. Everyone I know liked 2004's Garden State, and Braff directed a couple of first-rate episodes of Ted Lasso. But while I can count the number of Scrubs episodes I've seen on the fingers of one hand, the guy seems relentlessly sit-commy; his features Wish I Was Here and Going in Style were largely cloying; and everything about the advance publicity for A Good Person – in which, apparently, a broken woman Learned to Live Again thanks to the wise and sage advice of Morgan Freeman's signature baritone – screamed “Beware! Tragicomic whimsy with an acoustic-pop soundtrack ahead!” That's why it was such a pleasant surprise, and considerable relief, to actually view Braff's latest, which is annoying in the expected ways, but amazingly, pretty great in a lot of unexpected ones.

I suppose it's a backhanded compliment to say that the worst thing about A Good Person is its contrived premise, which finds Pugh's bride-to-be Allison accidentally killing her fiancé's sister and the woman's husband in a car accident, followed by, a year later, the opioid-addicted Allison showing up at the same AA meeting attended by Freeman's Daniel – the man who would've been her father-in-law. Not a funny situation. But nevertheless, most assuredly a sitcom situation, and Braff exacerbates the discomfort with overtly comedic turns by Molly Shannon as Allison's cheerfully drunk mother and, for all of 30 seconds, Jackie Hoffman as a profane neighbor with a garden hose. (I generally adore Hoffman, but this cameo that's showcased in the movie's trailer is 30 seconds better left on the cutting-room floor.) Adding an intensely nutty, tonally inappropriate scene near the end involving a rescue by gunpoint and introductory narration that almost seems like a parody of three decades' worth of Morgan Freeman voice-overs, Braff's latest should be a mess. And it is. But it's a mess with adjoining magnificence.

To his immense credit here, Braff never treats opioid addiction – or addiction of any kind – as a simple problem to be addressed and eventually vanquished. When we first see Allison post-accident, the woman is a wreck, and continues to be: violently demanding a fix like Zendaya on Euphoria; pathetically attempting to blackmail a friend in the pharmaceutical industry for pills; hooking up with a couple of skeevy high-school classmates for whatever drugs they're willing to supply. (One of these dudes is played, terrifyingly, by Alex Wolff, and as he was the last man standing in Hereditary and Pugh was the last woman standing in Midsommar, I was a tad disappointed that they weren't outfitted in matching “I survived Ari Aster” T-shirts.) Allison shows up for her first AA meetings high. She even gets high mere days after becoming “sober.” Allison, in short, is intensely unlikable – or would be, had the endlessly empathetic Pugh not kept you continually clued in regarding the woman's bottomless sorrow, as well as the bone-deep realization that Allison hates herself far more than you could ever hate her.

Freeman would seem to have the easier path, because on-screen at least, who could conceivably hate Morgan Freeman? Yet Braff's script gives the actor plenty of opportunities to suggest the nightmarish, alcoholic monster that his purportedly salt-of-the-earth former cop with the soothing voice used to be, and in a few scenes here, you're given a true reminder of the depth of Freeman's abilities – the ones that scared us silly, and led to his first Oscar nomination, in 1987's Street Smart. I had legitimately given up hope that the 85-year-old Freeman could still shock us with his talent. But damn if his Daniel isn't on par with the finest portrayals Freeman has ever treated us to. He and Pugh are oddly magical together, and Daniel's curt dealings with his son (Chinaza Uche's Nathan) and granddaughter (Celeste O'Connor's Ryan) are loving yet resoundingly bullshit-free.

There's probably too much time spent here on the symbolism of Daniel's model-train utopia (though I would kill for a full-length documentary on the model-train set's creation), and even though the character is only 16, Ryan makes a couple of narrative-progressing decisions that wouldn't make intellectual or emotional sense for a person of any age. But in a number of sequences – chiefly Allison's first AA testimony and Daniel's refusal to let Allison let herself off the hook – A Good Person is as strong a capitalized Issue Drama as Hollywood has released to theaters in years. It looks like Zach Braff is an outstanding writer/director. If he can learn to scrub off the Scrubs, he'll be an even better one.