DUNGEONS & DRAGONS: HONOR AMONG THIEVES
**½/****
starring Chris Pine, Michelle Rodriguez, Regé-Jean Page, Hugh Grant
screenplay by Jonathan Goldstein & John Francis Daley and Michael Gilio
directed by Jonathan Goldstein & John Francis Daley
CHAMPIONS
**½/****
starring Woody Harrelson, Kaitlin Olson, Ernie Hudson, Cheech Marin
screenplay by Mark Rizzo, based on the Spanish film Campeones written by David Marqués & Javier Fesser
directed by Bobby Farrelly
by Walter Chaw I like squad movies, always have. Heists, war, impossible missions, underdog sports teams, collections of samurai or cowboys, miscreants or heroes, misfits generally and specialists sometimes. When it came time to make a sequel to Alien, Walter Hill understood James Cameron’s pitch as exactly this formula the great Howard Hawks had perfected: the squad film. I think it works as well as it does because the requirement to craft three-dimensional heroes is lessened in favour of reliable, audience-pleasing character types. Each player has a skill–a personal Chekhov’s Gun, if you will. It’ll only be a matter of time before they use it. Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley’s Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (hereafter D&D) is one recent example of the squad flick; Bobby Farrelly’s Champions is another. Both are about bands of social outcasts who learn to appreciate how their respective skills complement one another along the way to greater lessons about the world and its navigation. One sees a team of Special Olympics athletes led by an unctuous, quippy white guy; the other sees a team of nefarious and/or magical ne’er-do-wells led by an unctuous, quippy white guy. Only one of them, though, dares to deviate from the winning-means-everything formula, measuring its victory in the celebration of a friend’s sense of self-worth and confidence. Which is not to say that one film is significantly better than the other, or even that they have different aims, ultimately. Rather, I only mean to suggest that the degree to which one is lauded and the other derided probably has a lot to do with internalized bias and very little to do with any meaningful distinctions in what these movies substantively are.
In D&D, the second attempt to turn the popular storytelling game into a franchise after Courtney Solomon’s earnest non-starter from 2000 (third if you include the early Tom Hanks vehicle Mazes & Monsters, a Satanic Panic flick for the D&D craze), Chris Pine’s Edgin is a widower caring for his adolescent daughter, Kira (Chloe Coleman). He’s also a charismatic rogue with a splash of the bard who leads a merry band of thieves with warrior Holga (Michelle Rodriguez), con man Forge (Hugh Grant), and fledgling wizard Simon (Justice Smith). The picture opens with Edgin and Holga already in a snowy tower prison for trying to steal a doodad that could potentially resurrect Edgin’s wife; the others have escaped captivity, and greedy Forge, entrusted with Kira’s care, has taken over a nearby kingdom with evil, scary sorceress Sofina (Daisy Head). Later, there’s a Paladin called Xenk (Regé-Jean Page) and a shapeshifter called Doric (Sophia Lillis, in a role Elliot Page would have played a decade ago), and a quest to find a helmet that will allow Simon to claim his birthright. Summarizing this plot is not unlike trying to tell innocent bystanders the details of your D&D campaign, years in the making.
Nevertheless, D&D captures the joy of a good campaign led by a funny and inventive dungeon master who keeps things lively. It throws enough pitfalls and monsters in front of the group to maintain a good pace, offering up plenty of loot and experience points along the way. Pine is incredibly comfortable in his skin in that way that made him the perfect evolution of Captain Kirk, and Lillis continues to be the best thing even in pictures that are already good. Rodriguez gets a surprisingly emotional line at the end when she suddenly, fully grasps how well-liked she is by her surrogate family, and Hugh Grant is that rare modern actor who would have been at home in an Ealing comedy. If it’s all as shallow as the no-diving end of a swimming pool, at least it’s as fleet as a movie that is inexplicably 134 minutes long can be considered efficient. The best part of the film for me is a janky, Big Bird-looking, full-body costume/Muppet called Chancellor Jarnathan (played by Muppet-named stuntman Clayton Grover), who sits on a parole panel for the film’s maximum-security prison. A defiantly practical and ridiculous walking sight gag, he’s beloved by the prisoners pleading their case before the panel for reasons that have nothing to do with his judicial acumen. While Jarnathan himself is pure slapstick, his government’s insistence on allowing him to participate in a process that has obviously been exploited repeatedly speaks to an entire subtext of impractical politics run on the same poor decisions and bad faith as ours. It’s one of the rare jokes in D&D that fillets a little closer to the bone, and I’m here for it.
Adapted from the Goya Award-winning Spanish film Campeones, Champions, as it happens, cuts close to the bone often, albeit unsubtly. But who am I? The subtlety police? Marcus (Woody Harrelson) is a disgraced basketball coach sentenced, following a DUI, to three months of community service coaching a Special Olympics team called “The Friends.” He is, in other words, in the same predicament as Hoosiers‘ disgraced basketball coach Norman Dale (Gene Hackman), who’s relegated to backwater Hickory, Indiana, where the townsfolk are inbred yokels who hate them big-city ways. Once there, Coach Dale gives drunkard Shooter Flatch (Dennis Hopper) a shot at redemption in front of his non-descript oaf of a son and convinces non-descript hoops prodigy Jimmy Chitwood (Maris Valainis) to play for him. There are other boys on Hackman’s team, including a short one who has to granny his free-throws. I make the comparison to argue that Champions is not only not worse than David Anspaugh’s machine-tooled, baby-food-soft bit of pre-masticated feel-good hokum, but in fact better in a few ways that matter.
Here, a couple of the players are given actual emotional arcs. Not all–who has the time?–but not none as in the beloved, venerated, bullshit garbage Hoosiers. There’s Johnny (Kevin Iannucci), for instance, brother of comely community-theatre Shakespeare actress Alex (Kaitlin Olson), who makes the difficult decision to stop living with his mother and sister and move into a group home with his friends. He refuses to play in the final game until he feels as though he’s a “champion” (a state defined to him as one of moral fortitude), and so he redresses this perceived lack by having a hard–and scary–conversation with his overprotective sister. It’s handled with lightness and a shorthand I would call necessary, but there’s real value in Johnny’s maturation. Ditto hoops prodigy Darius (Joshua Felder), who refuses to play for coach Marcus because, it’s revealed, he has been personally impacted by drunk drivers and loathes anyone who would get behind the wheel intoxicated. When Marcus learns this, he does what Coach Dale does and has a heart-to-heart with the reluctant small forward, though instead of being a combative prick, he tells Darius he understands his misgivings and would never pressure him into playing. It’s neither gaslighting nor reverse psychology, as it is in Hoosiers–it’s two adults confronting a difficult issue together. Later, Darius says he understands it would be good for him to forgive the person he’s angry with, but he can’t. That’s extraordinarily honest about the limits of reconciliation, and here it is in Champions.
And then there’s that ending, where the expected moment of uplift is undermined by a choice made by one of the Friends to let their centre, Showtime (Bradley Edens), have the moment he’s wanted all season, no matter its chances for success. I want to mention how Marcus is offered an NBA job as a third-assistant coach because of his work with The Friends–and how Champions wrestles with how this opportunity of a lifetime is probably the product of a billion-dollar corporation doing its best to capitalize on genuine good-feeling and camaraderie. The picture asks the right questions, shows well-intended people working their way through them, and presents it all lightly in a recognizable format. It even tackles the severe underfunding of social support systems in America, and how employees with mental disabilities are at high risk of being taken advantage of in the workplace. Watching Champions, I kept thinking of Puerto Rican model Sofía Jirau, the first Victoria’s Secret model with Down syndrome, who made her debut in 2020. Although she referred to the opportunity as a dream come true and hoped to be an inspiration for other people with her condition to aspire to traditionally ableist professions, a good portion of the response to her was immediate condemnation and concern that she wasn’t able to make her own decisions for her life. I mention this because The Friends in Champions are not condescended to. They are who they are, they demonstrate courage and a sense of humour; they are not there exclusively for the evolution of Marcus and Alex. There’s growth, and it’s mutual and it’s less dismissive and patronizing towards these adults with mental challenges than Hoosiers is with the Hickory kids and their social/class challenges. Anyway, D&D is going to start a billion-dollar franchise and Champions is going to be the movie you mention only for people to respond with disgust and trepidation. Worth thinking about.
