Movie reviews: 'Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves' is a breath of fresh fantasy air

DUNGEONS & DRAGONS: HONOR AMONG THIEVES: 4 STARS

You don't have to know or understand the role-playing game D&D to get the movie "Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves." Those who know that the acronym BBEG stands for Big Bad Evil Guy (or Gal) or that Monty Hall doesn't refer to the game show host, but to a type of campaign based on accumulating as much wealth/magic items as possible, will have a better chance at deciphering the in-jokes and Easter eggs, but for non-players, it still works as a fantasy action-comedy, complete with sorcerers, trolls and dragons.

The story begins with impish single father Edgin Darvis (Chris Pine) and barbarian Holga Kilgore (Michelle Rodriguez), making a daring escape from prison. They wound up behind bars when their planned robbery to steal the Tablet of Reawakening, an artefact with the power to resurrect the dead, went sideways. Their cohorts, Edgin's daughter Kira (Chloe Coleman), conman Forge Fitzwilliam (Hugh Grant), Sofina (Daisy Head) and sorcerer Simon Aumar (Justice Smith), escaped justice, disappearing into the wind.

Upon their "release" they discover that Fitzwilliam double-crossed them, has taken custody of Kira and is now living the high life as the wealthy Lord of Neverwinter. When it becomes clear Fitzwilliam is no longer an ally, Edgin and Holga go on a quest to find the Tablet of Reawakening, resurrect Edgin's dead wife, bring Kira back to the family and settle a score with Fitzwilliam.

But first they must find the Enchanted Helmut, a sideline aided by Sophia Lillis as Doric, a tiefling druid and shapeshifter and the heroic Xenk Yendar (Regé-Jean Page).

There's more, like Red Wizards and necromancy and talking corpses, but for all the fantasy on board the movie, this is really a very earth-bound story of friendship and family. With dragons and magic.

What could have been another dull game adaption transcends the nasty reputation left behind by bombs that were not nearly as fun as the games that inspired them, like "Battleship" and "Candy Land: The Great Lollipop Adventure."

Co-directors Jonathan M. Goldstein and John Francis Daley roll their twenty-sided dice (look it up) that audiences will value a fantasy story that uses humour as the backbone of the movie, the same way the "Lord of the Rings" flicks used allegories on the human condition to fuel theirs.

Luckily, mostly thanks to Pine's nimble touch, it works really well. His performance sets a lighthearted tone followed by fun work from Rodriguez et al. Page also impresses as a handsome hero who feels like a combo of Dudley Do-Right and Errol Flynn.

We are so used to serious, heavy fantasy that the rambunctious "Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves" feels like a breath of fresh air. It is old-fashioned; an old-school action adventure that aims to entertain above all else. It doesn't take itself seriously — although it is respectful to the world that inspired it — but does handle the action scenes, the world building, the characters, and the story with care.

SPINNING GOLD: 3 ½ STARS

Chances are, if you came of age in the 1970s, you helped make Casablanca Records the most successful independent record label of all time. With artists like Donna Summer, Parliament, Gladys Knight, the Isley Brothers, the Village People, Bill Withers and KISS on the roster, founder Neil Bogart sold millions of records and helped define the sound of the 1970s.

"Spinning Gold," a new biopic now playing in theatres, written, produced and directed by Bogart's eldest son Tim, is the story of how it happened. Kind of.

"If what you're after is the truth," Bogart says, "and not just what happened, but how it happened, then you are just going to have to believe all of it, because every single bit of it is true. Even the parts that weren't."

The story of Casablanca Records begins in Los Angeles, 1974. In the late 1960s the former singer and one-hit-wonder Bogart was a successful music executive. His ear for talent accelerated the rise of bubblegum pop, but it was a shock rock band from New York City, with face paint and futuristic stage outfits, that inspired Bogart to start his own label.

Refusing to ever take no for an answer, even after a disastrous label launch featuring KISS, whose pyrotechnics set off the sprinklers, leaving all the music biz big shots in attendance soaked and unimpressed, Bogart took risks no other executive could. Or would.

Flashbacks to his youth detail how the son of a poor Brooklyn postman rose to become a record industry mover-and-shaker. A charming combo of talent and nerve, with a healthy (and occasionally unhealthy) disregard for money, he cut a path through popular culture, following his personal motto: "Why head for the mountaintop when you're reaching for the sky?"

A kind of "What Makes Sammy Run" set in the music business, "Spinning Gold" is a fast-paced portrait of an old-school show business mogul — a high school drop-out who gambled as big as he dreamed. It is the stuff of dreams and, as such, plays like a kind of fantasy, with Bogart cast as a rock 'n roll fairy godfather. As played with great energy by Broadway star Jeremy Jordan, he grants people's wishes and his belief in his own ability to cast a spell over artists and executives alike, is almost supernatural. "We were in the business of making dreams come true," he says.

It all feels heightened, like a look at the era through a telescope, enlarged to the point where the image is so big it doesn't feel real anymore. But, unlike other music biopics — think "Bohemian Rhapsody" for instance — "Spinning Gold" has a meta self-awareness, and even breaks the fourth wall to acknowledge, "This never happened!" It's a fun stylistic choice, but later, the fictional hagiographic elements are tempered by the drugs, money issues and organized crime that enter the story midway through and give the movie a slightly grittier feel.

"Spinning Gold" relies too heavily on voice over—sometimes it feels like there's more VO than actual dialogue — but, like the man and the music it is based on, the movie is unapologetically large 'n loud in its need to entertain the audience and it mostly works with an appealing combo of performances and lots of ear-wormy music.

Most of all, as a portrait of a more free-wheeling time — "I'm not saying it wasn't sex, drugs and rock and roll, because it was," Bogart says. "But it was sex before it was deadly."

"Spinning Gold" succeeds not because it gets the details exactly right but because it captures the spirit of a time in the music industry when it was run by dreamers who had passion for the music, not MBA diplomas hanging on the wall.

TETRIS: 3 STARS

The addictive puzzle video game "Tetris," created by Soviet software engineer Alexey Pajitnov, couldn’t be simpler. Stack differently shaped pieces to form a whole and win points.

The story behind its success isn't.

A new movie starring Taron Egerton and now playing on Apple TV+, tells the story of how Dutch video game designer Henk Rogers fit the differently shaped pieces of international intrigue and video game creation together to secure the intellectual property rights to the popular game.

"The Soviet Union has worldwide rights," says Rogers. "Nothing gets out easily."

And how. In what is essentially a big business ticking clock story, Egerton is Rogers, an aggressive entrepreneur who discovers an early version of the simple game at the Consumer Electronics Show in the mid-1980s. An early adopter of video game technology, Rogers knows Tetris can be a hit.

"It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen," he says. "I played for five minutes, and I still see falling blocks in my dreams. It is poetry. It is the perfect game."

Developed by a Russian government software engineer Pajitnov (Nikita Efremov) in 1984, the game was an underground hit in the U.S.S.R., and starting to attract attention from other big players. The underdog Rogers finds himself up against Nintendo, media mogul Robert Maxwell (Roger Allam) and the Russian government.

"You want to play with the big boys?" threatens Maxwell. "This is how the world works."

"Tetris" is a convoluted tale of how Rogers navigates dubious agreements, business backstabbing and the very real threat of Russian prison, to secure the rights to the game and a future for his family. Unlike the game, the movie's pieces don't fit together easily. Part business story, part spy thriller, it piles a great deal of information into every scene, beginning with an unloading of exposition off the top that sets the scene, but may try the patience.

Once past the initial mound of info, screenwriter Noah Pink keeps up the pace, piling double-crosses on top of political scheming on top of jet setting skullduggery. It zips along at the speed of level 10 gameplay, and while it is sometimes hard to keep track of who is zooming who, Pink keeps it fairly linear, mostly focusing on how the various deals affect Rogers. Told from this point of view, the complicated story of contract law and how the negotiations for a video game became a Cold War concern is marginally easier to follow.

At the centre of it all is the elaborately mustachioed Egerton. As Rogers he brings an energizer bunny approach to the entrepreneur's unrelenting belief in the game and himself. As the story gets bigger and bigger — Henk against the world — it is Egerton that provides the human element, particularly in his friendship with Pajitnov. The surrounding performances are rather broad, but Egerton keeps it real.

Although it does feature 8-bit animation, "Tetris" isn’t a video game movie. Instead, it is a John Le Carre Lite political thriller, which could have used some of the simplicity of the game whose story it tells.

SPACE ODDITY: 2 ½ STARS

"Space Oddity," a new overstuffed feature directed by actor Kyra Sedgwick and now playing on VOD, flits around between space travel, trauma, ecology, family dynamics, and romance without ever settling on any one of them.

When we meet the McAllister family, Rhode Island flower farmers Jeff (Kevin Bacon) and Jane (Carrie Preston), daughter Liz (Madeline Brewer) and son Alex (Kyle Allen), they are dealing with great trauma. The death of their middle son has left the parents and sister lost, throwing themselves into work to cope with their loss.

Alex, however, has an out-of-this-world plan to escape his pain. He joins Mission to Mars, a private company — think Bezos and Musk — with plans to colonize Mars. It's not a one-way trip either. Earth is dying, Alex says, so why hang around?

His family goes along with his pipe dream until he gets serious, and applies for insurance to help finance the journey. At the insurance office, however, he meets Daisy (Alexandra Shipp), a broker who just might give the rocket man a reason to come down to Earth.

The subject of space travel is the method by which "Space Oddity" conveys its real message, about the state of our planet and what needs to be done to save our environment, but the addition of family drama and romance makes it feel like it is madly running off in several directions all at once.

It has the feel of an after school special. The lead, Alex, isn't a teenager, but he behaves like one, and Allen's wishy-washy performance doesn't do much to hold our interest at the centre of the film. He isn't aided by a script that telegraphs every plot twist in advance. If the film's journey had been more interesting, the predictable destination wouldn't be as bland.

"Space Oddity" simply bites off more than it can chew. The environmental messages are heavy-handed with no new ideas and, as a study of grief, it is far too lightweight.