After escaping prison, professional thieves Edgin (Chris Pine) and Holga (Michelle Rodriguez) return to the city of Neverwinter where his old friend Forge (Hugh Grant) has been protecting his daughter Kira (Chloe Coleman) and a magical tablet which could bring back his dead wife.
Edgin hopes to reunite his family are dashed when Forge betrays them and tries to have them killed. Adding salt to the wound, Forge has convinced Kira that the reason Edgin left her was pure greed.
Determined to prove to his daughter that Forge lied, Edgin and Holga engineer a plan to steal the tablet back.
To do this, they enlist the services for fledgling wizard Simon (Justice Smith), transforming druid (Sophia Lillis) and a mysterious stranger, Xenk (Regé-Jean Page), who may hold the key to their salvation.
Co-written and directed by John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein, the same team as Game Night, Honour Among Thieves is another genre hybrid that does not forsake its conventions and cliches for laughs.
There are jokes but they could be stripped out.
The focus is on the characters and the narrative structure of a quest.
What sticks out about the movie is how fleshed out the fantasy world is, without getting lost in lore or self-defeating jokes about what lore is necessary for the story to work.
The quest is filled with tangible obstacles and magic is given limits.
Like another recent fantasy movie I reviewed, Shazam 2, this is a genre movie that takes an earnest take on the conventions.
There’s a maze, a couple of dragons, cat people and a homunculus cameo from a famous star.
There are some interesting monsters - cannibalistic brains, undead soldiers, a monster which can project a hologram of itself to fool its prey.
Underneath this sugary topping, the dramatic bones are sturdy.
While it is not deep, it is a movie about found families, and how our hero learns to accept the family that he has, rather than trying to remake it.
Pine is excellent as the roguish Edgin, managing to balance the character’s pathos and cynicism without negating either.
The film’s villain - Hugh Grant’s con man - is deliciously underwhelming. He is a narcissist who is solely interested in enriching himself.
In an interesting wrinkle, he finds himself enjoying the role of foster father to Pine’s daughter, even if it is as a narcissistic exercise.
Rodriguez is playing an extreme version of her action heroine persona - and her stoic portrayal almost feels like her take on Vin Diesel’s Dom Toretto. This movie is her best vehicle involving action and families in a decade.
Honour Among Thieves is a solid genre movie.
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