DUNGEONS & DRAGONS (2000) Marlon Wayans, you suck It's hard to imagine a more wildly misguided movie than Dungeons & Dragons. Good actors are cast in roles which either shame them or just plain make 'em look silly. Cool set and creature design goes to waste under low-res CGI. Perhaps most ridiculously, a jive-talkin' black dude is added to the proceedings, apparently in an attempt to satisfy that demographic (hands up, anybody who ever knew a jive-talkin' black dude who played Dungeons & Dragons). No, wait, it gets sillier. Here's the problem: for a long, long time, maybe twenty years now, there have been on-and-off plans to get a movie based on the famous role-playing game off the ground. And after all this time, the final result is a movie which makes only the most cursory references to the game. I realize that the history of moviemaking is loaded with goofy things like this (paying millions to secure the rights to a bestselling book, and then only keeping about 5% of it come script time), but it shouldn't take decades to "accomplish". The plot of this movie is pretty much the standard for this kind of fantasy: the quest to find the Powerful Artifact which could Bring Peace To The World but would be Devastating In The Wrong Hands. This artifact is a scepter that will control all the red dragons in the world. The good young Empress Savina (Thora Birch) has a scepter that will control all the gold dragons in the world. (players of the game will wonder how perfectly intelligent creatures like red and gold dragons take to being manipulated like this; here they don't seem to mind. For that matter, they don't appear to be anything more than big, powerful animals, without much in the way of brains, and while in the game the two breeds were different in strength, temperament, and abilities, here the differences seem hide-deep.) But the evil mage Profion (incredibly, Jeremy Irons) has plans to either strip her of her scepter or obtain one of his own to secure the continued power of the council of mages (one of whom has a hilarious New York accent). So, somehow, a small-time thief named Ridley (Justin Whalin) and his bumbling partner Snails (Marlon Wayans, who screams like a little girl at everything which startles him) get involved in this and end up looking for the red scepter too. Along the way they hook up with a dwarf (who doesn't do anything for the whole movie other than turn over a table and consistently fail to draw blood even once with that huge axe) and an elf (who's mostly here to attract the affections of Snails), natch, and a pretty young mage-in-training (Zoe McLellan) who has a hell of a lot easier time conjuring up spells than I remember from the game. In other words, this is a plot that would've been just fine when I was ten, playing this game. (I eventually quit because of two reasons: I sucked at it, created hundreds of characters and never survived past level one, and I was conned into buying the 2nd edition...which was so loaded with errors and omissions that you had to buy Dragon magazine for about two years afterward to correct them all. Sleazy bastards...) And maybe that's who this movie is for, undiscriminating ten-year-old kids. Bah. Even undiscriminating ten-year-olds deserve better. Other parts of the plot are episodic and seem crudely stapled in to the finished edit, like one scene where Ridley has to navigate a much-dreaded maze (actually, just a twisty passage loaded with deathtraps) to recover an artifact, but also to amuse the motley assortment of thieves looking on from above (yeesh, if this movie was going to have more Star Wars references than I can count, did most of them have to be Return Of The Jedi references?). Acting ranges from likeable enough (McLellan), to moderately competent (Whalin) to hysterically hammy (Irons) to positively dreadful (Birch), to damn near offensive. I would be only perhaps the twenty-thousandth person to suggest that perhaps Mr. Wayans is unfamiliar with the name "Stepin Fetchit". This guy is basically Jar-Jar Binks to the hundredth power...and worse, because to most people, Jar-Jar is an alien, not a black human, and here's Wayans, who probably had to be dragged away from the makeup counter kicking and screaming so he wouldn't do himself up in blackface. If you were annoyed by Jar-Jar (and if you're over the age of ten, you probably were), then seeing this is gonna hurt. Aren't ALL of Marlon Wayans' roles like this, pretty much? How did this guy manage to avoid a role in Bamboozled? The script, courtesy of Topper Lilien and Carroll Cartwright, is the kind of thing which not even a remarkably talented actor like Irons or Birch could ever hope to save. Can you think of even one person who can pull off these cheesy declarations that all people should be equal? Could the greatest actor of all time survive lines like "Just like you thieves - always taking things that don't belong to you." with dignity intact? (good observation, by the way) Effects are plentiful and ambitious, but way too underfunded to really do much of a good job with them. The dragons are well-designed (standing upright with two big arms), and the endearingly unlikely cities of this world have countless spires thrusting up at the sky, built in areas which, to say the least, would probably not meet with the approval of competent engineers. But the low-res CGI does these designs no favors. (it is, however, mildly satisfying to behold the inevitable moment of a dragon getting impaled on one of those spires) There are a few throwaway references to the game ("I'd have to put a Feeblemind spell on myself to take you home!"), but nothing much is done with them, and often, they're contorted enough that they're not really references to the game anymore. One scene has several Beholders standing guard with soldiers. In the game, like dragons, Beholders are intelligent enough that they would probably consider sentry duty beneath them. So how are they getting these Beholders to stand guard? How do you compensate a nine-(ten?)-eyed floating Pac-Man for his services, in Power Pellets? Well, they're only here for two shots, so it doesn't much matter. Take out a couple of lines of dialogue, and it wouldn't even occur to TSR to sue if this movie was released as, say, Mazes & Monsters 2. (as if they're in any position to, the basic setup of D&D being such a shameless steal from Tolkien anyway, right down to hairy feet on the "halflings") Dungeons & Dragons sneaks in a fairly obvious Lucasfilm reference (either the Star Wars or Indiana Jones movies) about every ten minutes, some of them (the mage council scenes, Marlon-Marlon Binks) coming so hot on the heels of The Phantom Menace it'll make your head spin. There are a handful (a small, Hobbit-I-mean-halfling-sized handful) of inspired touches, like a lifeform Profion puts in the head of his chief goon Damodar (Bruce Payne with blue lipstick, worst performance of his I've seen) which shoots information-sucking tentacles out his ears. I don't remember that from the game. Irons' performance really has to be seen to be believed, as he hams it up even more outrageously than I thought he'd be capable of - and that's saying quite a bit. (Mis)directed by first-timer Courtney Solomon, the movie ends with a mournful little tribute to the fallen Snails, as if we're not glad he's dead (oh yeah, he dies - pathetically, I might add). Talk about misguided. On the plus side, I kinda miss this game now; I'd probably be better at it today. Dungeons & Dragons should only be seen by people who want to see Jeremy Irons take overacting to almost Jim Carrey-like heights, and players of the game who want to see just how badly a not-bad idea can be wrecked. Poor Thora. Playing an Empress must've seemed like such a good move at the time. BACK TO THE D's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE