What I got instead was a gently charming if rough-around-the-edges fantasy comedy, with a serviceable lead performance from Chris Pine as harper Edgin, Michelle Rodriguez doing her best with what she’s been given as barbarian Holga, and Hugh Grant giving it his hammy all as rogueish thief Forge Fitzwilliam. The plot is pretty standard fare: a rag-tag crew of sorcerers, thieves and vagabonds have got to get the band back together for one last heist – this time, they’re trying to retrieve a tablet of reawakening to bring Chris Pine’s dead wife back to life, as well as liberate a city from the dubious rule of a hapless lord, stop environmental destruction, learn the true meaning of friendship and self-belief, et cetera et cetera. So far, so Shrek.
Honour Among Thieves does suffer from a hefty dose of Marvel-style “I got it! I got it! … I don’t got it!” dialogue
The production values seem at times alarmingly, and perhaps even deliberately, low – some of the sets look like they were made for about 50p, and the humanoid bird characters are particularly disturbing – but this at least humanises the film in comparison to the latest Guardians of the Galaxy snoozefest, the trailer for which played before Honour Among Thieves and looks even more devoid of soul and full of CGI than previous instalments. Honour Among Thieves does suffer from a hefty dose of Marvel-style “I got it! I got it! … I don’t got it!” dialogue, but on the whole John Frances Daley and Michael Gilio have managed to produce a script that hits just about the right notes of wholesome and occasionally very funny, with some scenes – such as Michelle Rodriguez’s confrontation with her ex, in a surprising and well-utilised cameo from Bradley Cooper, and Regé-Jean Page’s turn as messianic but overly earnest paladin Xenk – eliciting genuine peals laughter from the audience (apart from the dad sitting next to me, who took the opportunity of two hours in a darkened room to loudly transfer all the phone numbers from his iPhone address book onto a brick phone, for some reason).
With an overall attitude that’s more pantomime than blockbuster – and an ending you could see coming from miles away, but what is the point of genre if not to tell us what to feel and when to feel it? – Honour Among Thieves feels like a distinctly low-effort Lord of the Rings, but for the uninitiated viewer it was a perfectly pleasant way to spend a rainy bank holiday afternoon. No doubt hardcore D&D players will have ripped the film’s already fairly perfunctory logic to shreds by now – either that, or the recently-announced Paramount+ spinoff TV series will see the characters and concept flogged to death across every conceivable medium and merchandising opportunity before the decade is out. Perhaps we are all Groot.
