'D&D: Honor Among Thieves,' 'Tetris' use games to pit good against evil

The biggest mistake the 2000 "Dungeons & Dragons" movie made, even a year before the 2001 release of Peter Jackson's "The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring," was to try and compete directly with the works of J.R.R. Tolkien.

Tolkien was a scholar who researched and curated his own awe-inspiring mythos, but "Dungeons & Dragons," the game, was created by nerds like Gary Gygax, who simply knew they wanted Tolkienesque fantasy, but more of it, so its mythology plagiarized from any set of legends or fantasies that its creators fancied.

It makes sense that such disorderly, inclusive world-building led to a roleplaying game whose adventures and plots invariably devolve into entertaining shambles, and it's precisely that spirit of nothing ever successfully going according to plan that "Honor Among Thieves" captures so perfectly, much like the underrated (and sadly canceled) "Willow" sequel series on Disney+.

All of the actors are typecast in their archetypal roles, but "Honor Among Thieves" makes it work, because none of them are heroes of legend; rather, they're the ones whose heads are so full of such tales that they wish they could be those heroes.

Chris Pine continues his hot streak of playing far better Captain Kirk characters outside of the "Star Trek" films. The same stuttering, self-involvement that made Hugh Grant an insufferable romantic lead makes him a delightfully hilarious cad here. Michelle Rodriguez remains as surly and formidable in combat as in all her action flicks, but that's what you want from a barbarian. Sophia Lillis appears set to continue playing fetchingly untamed tomboys well into her 30s.

They're stereotypes, but with fun twists. You'll be surprised by the barbarian's ex, even after I tell you he's played by Bradley Cooper, but after that, you'll be amused by how much you're not surprised by whom he's started dating in her absence.

More importantly, this is a story that stands up for nonstandard relationships. We see former lovers part amicably, and families with parents who aren't romantically involved with each other.

While any swords-and-sorcery fable can trot out standard-issue monsters, this is "Dungeons & Dragons," so get ready for Displacer Beasts, Gelatinous Cubes, and yes, Gygax's Owlbears, which are exactly what they sound like.

Fans of "Dungeons & Dragons," the 1983-85 cartoon, will spot a suspiciously familiar set of young adventurers competing with this film's heroes, while fans of 2012's "The Avengers" will note at least one final-act beatdown that appears to be an homage to the Hulk versus Loki.

But in the end, the day is won, not by strength, but by cleverness, charm and a Robin Hood sense of altruism, fitting for a fantasy film whose alignment is "Chaotic Good" at heart.

The midcredits scene isn't vital to the story, nor does it tease a sequel, but it's worth sticking around for as a punchline to a premise set up by an initially morbid magic spell earlier on.

"Tetris" on Apple TV+:

Unlike many of my fellow nerds, I've never been a video game enthusiast, and I never saw the appeal of Nintendo's Game Boy - funny, considering that my dad's last job before he retired was working for Nintendo - but the biographical film "Tetris" succeeds at making me care about the addictive video game that helped launch the Game Boy, in no small part by revealing the stealth Cold War thriller behind the game's origins.

Yes, the real-life figures behind the film's drama admit its version of historical events is sensationalized, and I didn't feel great seeing lead character Henk Rogers' Indonesian heritage whitewashed by the film's casting of Welsh actor Taron Egerton in the role.

The film's use of 1980s-style video game graphics to mark narrative transitions, and to jazz up both expository and action sequences, is engaging, even if it is expected, while the scenes set in the Soviet Union hammer home how treacherously tense and heavy Russians' everyday lives were behind the Iron Curtain.

"Tetris" doesn't require much artistic license to portray former Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev as being at least tertiarily involved in the international intrigue involving a game whose appeal was expanding across enough borders to make it a potential money-making machine, given that it came from a country ideologically opposed to validating capitalism.

Although corrupt communist officials sought bribes to grant licensing for this game outside of the Soviet Union, even as they actively denied the game's Russian inventor any stake in its profits, they're not even the biggest villains in this tale, thanks to the Maxwell family.

Robert Maxwell, the multimedia magnate who raided his own employees' pensions of hundreds of millions of dollars before he died in 1991, was competing with Henk Rogers and Nintendo for the rights to license Tetris.

In the film, Maxwell is played with all the bombastic aplomb one would expect from Roger Allam - unrecognizable beneath his prosthetic makeup until he speaks, and reveals himself with his smugly plummy voice - as the elder Maxwell was joined in his efforts by his entitled adult son Kevin (a sniveling Anthony Boyle) and software distributor Róbert Stein (Toby Jones, who decided his accent as Arnim Zola was good enough for the Hungarian-born Stein).

While Stein's real-life granddaughter, Claire, is likely entitled to her aggrieved feelings over his portrayal, Maxwell is perhaps the only billionaire or media baron whom everyone can now agree, regardless of their politics, was easily one of the worst human beings who ever lived (his daughter, Ghislaine, abetted Jeffrey Epstein's sex offenses), so it is viscerally satisfying to see him lose out to our earnest, deserving go-getters here.

And while this comparison might seem initially ridiculous, "Tetris" shares in common with HBO's 2019 "Chernobyl" miniseries its championing of the quiet heroism of ordinary Russians, who defied their own government for the greater good, without any expectation of reward.

Author Bio

Kirk Boxleitner, Reporter

Shelton-Mason County Journal & Belfair Herald
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