Dungeons & Dragons (2000)

Date Reviewed: 6-3-2001

Critical Kobold Rating:    (1 out of 5 Tasty Fish)

 

Save Vs. Nauseousness

Update: Jan 25, 2011

     This review was originally written in June of 2001, almost a full decade ago. It was in fact the movie that prompted this kobold to take up quill and vellum and become a critic. It took ten years before I could even consider re-watching this hideous troll-barf of a movie. However, while recently flipping through the channels on a lazy Saturday afternoon looking for some quality entertainment, such as a re-run of a Hooters swimsuit competition, I came across the official Dungeons & Dragons movie, inflicting itself on a new generation of unsuspecting gamers. Steeling myself with a hefty refill of gnomish grog, I gritted my teeth and vowed to make it through one more viewing to see if I had somehow been overly harsh in my critique of the work.

     Do not, esteemed reader, ever say that this kobold does not sacrifice himself for his art, because I will bite your face off.

     It is safe to say that not only was I not overly cruel in my original assessment, but I believe that in my stunned and woozy state brought about by the fact that watching this movie actually sucks IQ points from your brain, I may indeed have produced a gentler review than this insipid piece of orog excrement deserved. At any rate, here is the updated version of the review, expanded and edited to reflect tidbits of detail overlooked the first time, and aggravating memories that came to me as I watched the tale unfold for a second time.

     Pass the grog, dammit.

     Greetings, fellow moviegoers and gamers.

     Last night I had the grave misfortune of renting the movie Dungeons & Dragons. What follows is a harrowing and intricate review of my personal feelings for the film. Stop reading now if you have a Constitution score less than 5.

     First off, I am aware that some of you have also seen this film, and if you can shed light upon any of the points I bring up here, please feel free to do so. Also, I'm going to give away major plot points (not like that will hurt the plot in any way), so don't read this if you plan on seeing the movie. 

     No, on second thought, read this instead, and DON'T see the movie.

     I didn't see this at the theaters, oddly enough. Like  most enthusiastic D&D gamers, I at first reveled in the announcement  that a movie based on D&D was in the works.  As the release grew nearer, however, I found that every time I read something about the film, I heard within my head the faint, ominous orchestral music reserved for suspense movies wherein the hero is about to meet some dire and loathsome foe. When the movie came and went in theaters within a week, I suspected the worst.

     I wasn’t even aware that the movie was out on video until last night as I strolled through Blockbuster. On reflection, I should have known earlier in the week that something was amiss in the world when a dark and vile omen appeared on TV... yes, The Adventures of Buckaroo Bonzai, one of the worst films ever in the history of mankind, had been on. The appearance of Buckaroo re-runs, much like an appearance of the Four Horsemen, never heralds anything good.

     OK, so let me throw out some background before we get rolling. The creator and director of this film was a dude named Courtney Solomon. Courtney was 29 when he made this film, and it was his first directing gig. Solomon claimed he’d been a D&D aficionado when he was a schoolboy, and somehow in 1990 he acquired the rights to make an official D&D movie from TSR, the erstwhile owners of the Dungeons & Dragons role playing game. (I’m guessing a mass charm spell was involved, because how else can you explain TSR looking at a 19- year- old nobody with absolutely no film experience, handing him the rights to the biggest name-brand product in the gaming market, and nodding to themselves, “Yeah, this is the man to get the job done!”) It then took Solomon ten years to get funding for the project, and the result is this flick.

      Part of the enthusiasm exhibited by gamers when the project was first announced stemmed from the fact that the role-playing community was pleased that a fellow gamer was in charge, because they figured they would get something true to the source material. The truth was far, far more chaotic evil. You see, it turns out that Mr. Solomon had no goddam clue how to portray some incredibly basic tenants of the D&D game material, nor did he know how to make a coherent movie. From every shred of evidence provided by this film, it’s easy to believe two facts: that Solomon had never actually read a single Dungeons & Dragons game book in his life, and that if he had even been a film student, his GPA must have hovered in the “D” range. That, or he’s an utter idiot.    

     So let’s just heave a mighty sigh of resignation, and get to it…

     Firstly, I have no solid idea what Dungeons & Dragons was about. I know what each character was doing during the film, but I have no clue as to why anyone is really doing anything. Even after several scene rewinds, in which I thought perhaps I had missed some vital clue to the plot, I was no nearer to understanding this movie's point. Many of the things that happen are so contrived, or nonsensical, that your Intelligence would have to be in the “3” range to accept them as reasonable.

     It seems that the  young Empress Savina rules Izmer, a magocracy (a kingdom ruled by the wizard class.) If you're not a wizard, then you're a poor oppressed peasant. Makes sense so far. The Empress wants to make everyone equal in status with wizards, and therefore wants the Wizard Council to agree with her that peasants are people too. Since she and the movie never once explain how exactly everyone is going to be equal even if the wizards agree to her point (does everyone get to wear a pointy hat?), I personally didn't really get behind her noble cause, but let's not get into that yet. I’m also not sure why an Empress needs the OK of a council to do anything, but perhaps it’s some weird progressive government and the title Empress isn’t as cool and powerful as it sounds. Her token of station is a staff that allows her to control gold dragons. I guess the Empress wanders around with that, in case she should bump into a dragon, like, hiding in her wardrobe or something.
 

     The fact that I am still hazy on the plot is especially surprising because of the amazing amount of exposition done during the first twenty minutes of this movie. Every character explains in excruciating detail why they're doing whatever it is they're doing, even if they're talking to somebody who knows perfectly well what that character is doing. I know this is supposed to get the plot rolling, but it just makes everyone sound like a blathering dolt and does surprisingly little to help the plot make sense.

     Meanwhile, it seems the evil wizard Profion wants to control...things. (The Mage Council? The City? The World? I have no idea.)  To do so, he convinces, apparently without magic, the entire wizard council that the Empress is a rebel with fanciful ideas of giving rights to the peasants, and that the council needs to boot her out of power and seize her staff of dragon control.  From the scenes, I'd say there are about 40 wizard council members, and why every single one of them goes along happily with Profion's vague and completely unsubstantiated assertion that the Empress is a danger is beyond me. I guess they're all terrified of peasants being people, too. Apparently it’s not important to the plot, so let's move on. 

     Profion discovers that there’s another staff of dragon control somewhere in the kingdom, only this one controls red dragons, which are evil. Profion figures if he can get his hands on that staff, he can use the red dragons to rule once Savina and her gold dragon staff are out of the way. Profion sends his Captain of the Guard underling, Damodar, to the mages’ guild to pry the location of the red dragon staff out of the Empress’ mentor.

     Enter our … um… “heroes,” who make Jar Jar Binks and Scooby Doo look like masters of their craft.  The protagonist Ridley is OK, in a sidekick kind of way, really. Too bad he's not the sidekick. He’s supposed to be the dashing, roguish, self-sufficient, wrong-side- of- the-wagon- tracks type. The actual sidekick is “Snails” (Damon Wayans), who's the most grating, annoying, detestable asswipe this side of Snarf from "Thunder Cats".  Snails is spastic and whiney and inept. I wouldn't penalize any of you in a D&D game for running a character like this through with a dull two-handed sword. He’s the comic relief character, if your idea of comic relief is a sharp slap in your nads.

 
     Ridley and Snails are two thieves who do absolutely nothing thiefly during the whole movie (not successfully, anyway). This is the first example of Solomon not understanding a key archetype of the D&D game: thieves have specialized skill sets that allow them to be, you know, sneaky. These two dipshits aren’t quiet, they don’t pick pockets, they can’t climb walls without rope and hooks, they can’t read unfamiliar script, find traps – which is very obvious as the movie progresses - or hear noise or hide in shadows. These things are all basic thief skills, dudes. These guys have none of those talents. Well, during one scene, Snails does snag a candelabra and what appears to be an ugly stuffed cat doll, from a merchant stall. In plain sight. In broad daylight. Are those really valuable items, that a thief would risk stealing? And no, the scene serves no useful point whatsoever. Then again, none of the scenes in this movie do.
 

     By the way, Damodar has bright blue lips, for absolutely no discernable reason whatsoever. Seriously. He looks perfectly human, but his lips are baby blue, and no explanation for this is ever offered during the film. It's distracting in every single scene he's in. I didn't hear any of his dialogue because every time he was speaking, I was busy thinking, "What the hell is up with those lips?!"

     Now, Marina and the two goobers flee, taking the map with them. Damodar gives chase. As the heroes run from Damodar's lips, they find a dwarf, who is so utterly unnecessary to this film that they never even mention his name. (In the credits, he’s billed as “Elwood.” That’s right, Elwood the dwarf. I think it’s for the best that we never heard this during the film.) His function in the film seems to be to wear a stupid-ass helmet and squint through a red beard, thereby proving that he's a dwarf. You think I'm exaggerating when I say he does nothing else at all in the film, but that's about it. Did I mention that this 'dwarf' is about 5'8"? Also, his beard noticeably changes hue repeatedly from dull red to bright orange from scene to scene throughout the movie. Oh, and his battle axe is obviously styrofoam. Couldn’t even spring for an aluminum one from the BudK catalog, eh, guys?

     We have the obligatory Tavern Scene, where the party hides out from Damodar while trying to read the map. Solomon obviously tried to recreate the exotic theme of the Star Wars cantina here, as the camera pans over dozens of beings partying down. There are halflings, and what I guess is an orc, and lots of peasants and dancing girls, but there are also many random, ugly humanoid guys which have absolutely no basis in any known D&D species. Once again, Solomon displays no knowledge whatsoever of traditional D&D material or flavor. His idea of interesting is to let his costume crew outfit all the extras in $3.75 worth of crappy costumes, regardless of whether the result looks even remotely like something from the game. One or two of the “monsters” in the tavern are guys with furry pieces of material over their faces, like werewolf masks some third grader’s mom made out of an old angora sweater (and I’m not exaggerating the utter crapalaciousness of their get-ups.) The sad part is that the orc, or whatever the green armored guy is supposed to be, actually looks pretty damn cool, but we barely see him. And what’s an orc doing in the middle of the city in a bar, anyway? In fact, what are any of these humanoid monsters doing in this bar?? (Solomon, I already have a Bigby’s hand gesture for you…)

     Speaking of deeply defined races, the Empress has sent her elf ranger Norda (or Norker or Nordic Trak or something like that) to secretly follow the heroes too, because... I dunno, she thinks the heroes are criminals or some shit, who are going to steal the red staff to use for themselves.  I don't really know why the hell she's trudging along behind these idiots, to be honest. At this point in the film I stopped trying to make sense of the "story line". At any rate. She shows up in the tavern, and Snails begins hitting on her. 

     Anyway, the elves are portrayed in the movie as:

     1) humans with pointy ears (as is the case with Norda), or 
     2) freaks wearing half-eaten animal skulls as hats, who speak what sounds suspiciously like a Slovak language.

     That's as much elvish culture as we get into in this masterpiece of character development. At least they get their own language, unlike the dwarf. For whatever reason, Norda teams up with this group of winners. I suppose on the off chance that they recover the staff, she can grab it and take it back to Savina. Even though she’s working with them, she spends a good deal of time up in trees staring down at them. I would think continuously stopping to climb trees and watch everyone walk below you would tend to slow you down, but I’m not an elf tracker, so what do I know?

     OK, here’s another bit of movie trivia. For some reason, the next important scene was cut from the film entirely. You see, the map is magical. Ridley and Marina get sucked into the map itself while trying to decipher it in the tavern. There was originally a scene shot that took place *inside* the map, wherein the plot was laid out, and Ridley was told by someone else trapped in the map to retrieve a gem called the Dragon’s Eye, which would allow him to find the staff of red dragon control. However, we never get to see that map scene, as it didn’t make it into the film. Instead what we see is Ridley and Marina just pop back out of the map and announce that they’re going to some other city for this random gem they need. It doesn’t really make the movie suck any more than it already does at this point, but Jesus, is it sloppy filmmaking. It’s like intentionally trying to lose your audience by hiding a plot twist from them. Also, apparently the missing scene had set up Ridley as some sort of Chosen One, and laid out some revelations about his past, but we aren't privy to any of that either. If you listen very closely to the expository banter between the characters as they leave the city, you can keep up with what they’re going to do, but it’s a fast and disorienting info dump, seemingly out of left field, and it's hard to understand why they're doing it.

     Of course, Purple Guy is sometimes accompanied by another dude who's got what appears to be green magic marker on his face as his makeup.  I guess the costume budget ran out with the third eye for our contact character. In fact, a great deal of the ne’er-do-wells in this city have brightly painted faces, which you’d think would mark them as rather recognizable when out and about trying to pick pockets and whatnot. Maybe the citizens of this city are just not very aware of their surroundings, which would be my best and only guess as to how a brazenly ostentatious “thieves’ guild” could operate here. I mean, the Keystone Kops could have rooted out the bad elements within a week.

 

     Next our… “heroes”… meet the thief king, who says that Ridley can only have the Dragon’s Eye if he survives a trapped maze. This sets up a scene where Ridley gets to pull an “Indiana Jones”, cleverly evading swooshing blades in a narrow passage, gouts of flames from the walls, a heavy closing portal, a sliding wall, and hell, probably that Nitro guy from American Gladiators, before yanking the gem off a pedestal at the end of the incredibly lame maze o’ doom. Of course, once Ridley exits the maze with the Eye via a simple door into a hallway, the thief king double-crosses the gang, demanding the gem for himself.

     Ok, wait, what? Hm. The twist here is s’posed to be that the Guildmaster had never actually owned the gem, because it was, I dunno, always stuck in the maze, and the Guildmaster just… I dunno, inherited the maze of death, and had never actually completed it himself. So I guess he was just waiting around for some winner to come along and snag the Dragon’s Eye for him. Or something.   

    Um… wait. How the fuck did the Guildmaster have the gem in the middle of his maze, in the middle of his underground lair, and never own the gem, again? Because, you see, the entire maze has a spectator balcony around the top, where the Guildmaster, Marina, and a horde of Crayola-faced thieves followed Ridley’s progress the entire time he was in the maze below them. So, why couldn’t the thief king simply walk to the end of the maze, and hop down off the balcony, and grab the gem?! Or, you know, just have dismantled all the damn traps? Or, just have walked through the back door that leads directly into the gem room, where Ridley emerged?

     Arrrrrrrgh! Brain… cramping… up!

     Before we have a chance to go into convulsions from the logic knot of that scene, Damodar and about twenty of his guards appear, also demanding the Eye. (How they hell did they find the guildmaster’s lair? Is this the world’s worst hidden thief hideout, or what?) The guildmaster’s minions attack the guardsmen, allowing Ridley to run for it with the Eye, but Damodar ends up with the map and Marina as a hostage.

     In order to recover the map so they can see where to take the Eye, and to rescue Marina, our …”heroes”… wind up sneaking into the ruined castle where Damodar’s camped out.  Ridley and Snails are going in. The dwarf prepares to go with them, but is stopped by Norda, who makes the sage statement that, “This is a task they must do alone.”

     What the…? Where did that come from? I’m quite sure Norda’s not going because she has no true relationship with these dumbasses and couldn’t care less if Marina is saved. In fact, it’s to the Empress’ benefit if the staff is never recovered, so why would Norda help these bozos in any way? So I’m surmising that she stops the dwarf so that the two thieves have an exponentially greater chance of getting capped on the way in. That would actually make sense, right? (I mean, if you’ve stayed conscious long enough to follow this bullshit plot.) But what’s this mystic oracle schtick she’s pulling? And why does the dwarf, who doesn’t even like elves, simply shrug and accept this bizarre proclamation?!

     OK, ok, stop trying to follow the plot based on, you know, a sense of coherency. Let’s move on.

     The castle, we soon see, is guarded by...beholders! YES! Some of the nastiest and most fearsome bastards in the book! Beholders can make the most experienced adventurers soil their pantaloons; they’re giant levitating spheres with gaping maws full of devastating teeth, and they have rows of eyeballs on stalks, and each of the eyeballs can fire off nasty spell-like powers such as fear, cause serious wounds, telekinesis, and the horrific disintegrate. Now we're talking about some action, right?
 

     HA!

     The beholders are in the film for about 16 seconds.  Altogether. (Yes, I timed it.) Apparently in his ten-year fundraising quest, Solomon didn’t come up with the scratch for awesome CGI floating heads. (That money will all be spent in a truly baffling dragon fight later on. Just wait.)

     So, you want to know how the wily… "heroes"… get past the dreaded beholders?  THEY THROW A ROCK.  And the beholders all hover off in search of the invaders on the other side of an archway.  And never come back. (Siiiiigh!)

     OK, where was I?  Oh, right, the crappy movie...

     So, they split up to get the map and their magic user, and as anyone who’s ever played D&D knows, splitting the party is of course the best course of action one can take. (Insert kobold rolly eyes emoticon here.) In yet one more display of ineptitude, Snails finds the red rod map after prancing and flitting around Damodar’s chamber for several minutes like a five year old ballerina. (I’d really be starting to wonder about Snail’s sexual orientation long about now, if I gave a shit about the character.) Snails then promptly steps into a fake-rug pit trap deviously filled with what looks like melted marshmallows, and gets hopelessly caught. (Did you catch the part at the beginning of the review when I explained that thieves in the D&D game are adept at finding traps? Or at least not gaily leaping blindly into them? Yeah, Solomon missed that.) Anyway, Snails gets nabbed by Ol’ Blue Lips, to the surprise of absolutely no one.

     So there’s a brief chase scene where Snails escapes from Damodar’s clutches (I’m not sure how; my mind had begun to wander onto more interesting topics than this movie, such as imagining sorting my whites from my colors in the laundry.) However, Snails manages to run straight into a very high courtyard of the ruined castle, with no way down. Damodar approaches, making it clear that he’ll smoke the whiney thief if he doesn’t hand over the Eye or the map.

     Now, Snail’s best bet would be to simply wait until the warrior gets close, then bolt around him and run for the stairs, because from all appearances, Snails is way faster on his feet than the armored and sulky fighter, even when prancing. Seizing upon this opportunity to bolt around his foe, and then tossing that opportunity away like a hobgoblin’s dirty jockstrap, Snails the dumbass novice thief instead decides to fight veteran badass warrior captain Damodar.

     Siiiiigh. What. The. Flaming. Hell?

     OK, anyway, Snails immediately gets his ass heinously beaten six ways to Sunday, with Damodar even breaking out some jujitsu moves just for fun, until Ridley and Marina arrive to interrupt the pulverizing. And let me say that in this scene, we get our first up close look at Damodar’s codpiece. Jesus! It’s like one of those bull skulls strapped on the front of a Cadillac in Texas! Except shiny metal. This is irrelevant to anything, I’m just stunned by it. Anyway, Snails tosses the map to Ridley, and Damodar promptly runs Snails through with his blade, and hurls his dying carcass off the castle wall.

     AND THERE WAS MUCH REJOICING!!

     Seriously, I was out of my chair and cheering before I realized this was supposed to be a sad moment at the loss of a beloved heroic character. Heh heh heh heh! Whatever, dude. That rocked. Especially since there was no pressing reason for Damodar to painfully slay Snails at that point. It was clear that Damodar simply despised the loser as much as we did.

     Ridley, seeing how well his friend had fared against someone who actually engages in combat for a living, decides, 'what the heck', and attacks Damodar also. Aaaaand promptly gets a sword driven straight down into his clavicle. Daaaamn, that looks painful just watching it! Way to go, Conan. Got ‘im right where you want him, eh, thief?

     Marina manages to stun Damodar with a magic spell before he can completely shish-kabob our retarded protagonist, then she conjures up a dimension door, and the… "heroes"… escape into the forest. Norda takes them to the elven lands, where Ridley is brought back from the brink of death by… HOLY CRAP, it’s the Doctor! Seriously, Tom “Doctor Who” Baker is playing an elf elder. His cameo is all of about ninety seconds long, but still. Good to see him. Too bad it’s in this film. Anyway, Ridley is given a magic short sword as a gift, which is not at all like Sting from The Hobbit, nope, no way.

     Once healed, the gang can follow the map to the cave where the red staff is hidden. As they try to enter the cave to retrieve the staff, an invisible wall of force stops everyone except Ridley from passing. (See? This would have been the time for Nordik Tracker the elf to spout some crap about Ridley being destined to do stuff himself. Here, it would be obviously appropriate, and not just some stuff she was pulling out of her ass to avoid work.) In the cave, Ridley has a conversation with an animated skeleton, who I’m assuming is an undead wizard or something. The dead dude gives Ridley some small talk which may or may not have been in some way tied to the plot, but, seriously, does anyone give a shit at this point? I couldn’t even stay focused on who this moldy guy was s’posed to be. I just don’t caaaaaare! Whoever he is, he also gives Ridley the staff of red dragon control, which, and I kid you not, is very, very obviously a cheap-ass plastic Halloween toy from a dollar store. I would not be the slightest bit surprised if it squirts bubbles.

     When Ridley triumphantly exits the cave, there’s our friend Damodar and his soldiers yet again. He’s got all Ridley’s motley crew hostage. And that freakin' idiot moron Ridley trades the staff to Damodar in exchange for his captured friends. Why?  Because Damodar said he'd let his friends live if Ridley gave him the staff. Yeah, this is the same Damodar who, three scenes earlier, stabbed Ridley's best friend through the chest and hurled him off a castle battlement for no particular reason.  (Well, other than the fact that it was Snails.) 

     Good move, Ridley! He wouldn't possibly screw with you TWICE, would he?
 

(Sound of my head banging off the table several times.)

     So anyway, Damodar immediately reneges on his word (surprise, Ridley!!) and orders the party to be killed slowly. The gang manages to escape from Damodar’s mook squad, and a bunch of mostly pointless stuff happens, yadda yadda yadda, and the heroes get back to the mage city, where swarms of immense gold dragons are attacking. 

     I don't know why. The Empress controls the gold dragons with her staff, so maybe they're attacking just the mages who turned against her?  But there are a LOT of dragons and a lot of fighting for a just couple of lousy mages. And the dragons seem to be randomly breathing destructive fire at any building they pass near, whether there’s any indication that there’s a mage in it or not. And the city of Izmer, for the record, has more high-rise skyscrapers than any metropolitan modern-day city I’ve ever seen. These are some serious high-tech Medieval civil engineers, my friends.

     Then Blue Lips shows up, and Profion gets the red dragon staff of control, and summons a buttload of red wyrms to fight the gold ones, and there's all sorts of city buildings going up in flames and dragons crashing into things and whatnot.  It's a lot of CGI animation that could certainly have been better used to animate beholders, and I don't really understand what the hell any of it means, but if you get to this part of the movie you'll have given up all hope and a good bit of your cognitive functions anyway.

     In the middle of the bedlam, Ridley enters the bad guys’ command tower behind both Damodar and Profion. Now, the last thief skill that you need to know about that all D&D rogues possess is the ability to back stab an opponent viciously. But to do so, you have to, you know, sneak the hell up on ‘em. So, being in a position directly behind his unsuspecting foes, Ridley ninjas up behind them as silently as a shadow, and strikes with blinding speed, before his opponents are even aware of his pres…

     Oh, fuck. No, no he doesn’t. Ridley yells loudly to attract Damodar’s attention. Once the warrior has had time to draw his huge sword and ready himself, that’s when our strategy-master Ridley lunges forward with the combat skills of a drunken halfling. OK, truth be told, he’s not really that bad in this scene, for an amateur, which makes me wonder, firstly, where he learned to sword fight that well, and secondly, if dueling was a skill he already knew, why’d he get his ass handed to him back in the castle when he faced Damodar the first time?  Those rational thoughts quickly die in the sucking vacuum of stupidity that emanates from this movie, so I press onward, glassy-eyed.

     The remainder of the battle looks nothing like that between Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker in Return of the Jedi, nope, no way. Damodar is a tall, dark-armored villain whose long sword flashes with red electricity when he strikes (when the hell did it start doing that?!), and Ridley’s not-Sting pulses with blue energy when he blocks, as the two circle on a darkened battleground, Ridley filled with righteous emotion and Damodar’s raspy deep voice calmly cajoling and mocking the younger hero with a tone of evil arrogance.

     Ridley at some point snags the red dragon staff, and begins to use it to turn the nasty dragons to his bidding, feeling their anger and power coursing through his own being. He revels in the might, and begins to use it to destroy his enemies… but then realizes that he’s peering over the abyss into Neutral Evil territory, and at the last minute he turns from the Dark Si… uh, from using the evil magic, and instead he breaks the rod in twain! Totally original allegorical imagery there, Solomon. (You know, back when it was done a long time ago, in 1980, in a place far, far away...)

     Via the One True Magic of writer fiat, Ridley dispatches Damodar, and the Empress gets a gold dragon to eat Profion.

     In the final scene (yeeeaaaa!), the heroes stand around Snail's grave as the Empress announces that indeed equality has come to the kingdom, and that the mages are no longer the haughty-taughties of the land.  Again, we have no clue at all as to what the hell that means, as nothing seems to have changed, except for humongous dead gold and red reptiles littering the streets. Then, in the final act of incomprehensibility, Snail’s name disappears from the grave marker, and the four surviving heroes standing around the grave are transformed into little flying bundles of gold sparkles, and they zip off into the air like berserk fireworks.

     I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT THAT MEANS!!

     Did I mention that Jeremy Irons, the guy playing Profion, appears to be on crack the entire movie?  In every scene he's in, he's bulging his eyes and twitching and babbling about controlling everything, and gesturing maniacally.  I guess he figured if he distracted viewers with a spastically hyper, overacted performance, they wouldn't notice what a load of orc dung his agent got him mixed up in.

     Not that the rest of the acting is much better. I’m giving props to Damodar, though, who’s played as the brooding villainous henchman to the tee, considering the material the poor actor had to work with. But everyone else was over-emoting like a third rate small-town improv troupe. Clearly, the fledgling director Solomon had no experience pulling empathy or substance of any sort from his actors. Even the main characters in this atrocity come off as pretty one-dimensional, and the dialogue sounds as though it were written by a 15 year old, so that doesn’t help their cause any. 

     The entire movie is the kind of D&D adventure we were having in middle school, only less cleverly handled.  It strikes me as obviously geared for perhaps the 12-17 year old demographic. (Slightly retarded 17 year olds, maybe.)  I don't know why I expected more from the movie.  I guess I should have known it was just a limp, poorly-done exercise in name brand marketing rather than an actual movie about epic fantasy adventure. I think it’s most aggravating, if not downright insulting, because D&D is such a venerable cornerstone of gaming history, like Pong and chess, and deserved an actual talented production crew and an intelligent script. I mean, hell, we can all name a half dozen popular video games in the past decade that received film treatment, and all of those flicks were better than this troglodyte turd.

     Sigh!  Well, what can one do?  I'm afraid I've been so scarred by this portrayal (betrayal?) of the game that we so love that I may very well need to rent Hawk the Slayer to renew my faith in good, cheesy D&D classics.  O, Willow, where art thou?!

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