Dungeons & Dragons (2000)

I think that many of the users here do "Dungeons and Dragons" a bit wrong. Not that I want to say it is by any means an excellent movie or anything alike, but it is not so much worse than your average mediocre fantasy movie.I don't know in how far the franchise is adopted in the movie, so really in this aspect I can't say much or argue. But what we get story-wise is a fantasy tale already told a hundred times before. There is a kingdom with a proud and honest queen, threatened by heartless inner opponents and finally depending on unlikely heroes to be saved. Not very original but good enough for a one-timer.I actually kind of connected with the characters, even though they are sure mostly one-dimensional. Nonetheless their characteristics along with the trash factor of the movie, added up quite nicely to give this film some substance. It is settled somewhere between a child movie, for which it is a bit too explicit, and an adult fantasy film, for which it is a bit too childish.All in all lay back, relax, expect nothing and you won't be disappointed.

Dungeons and Dragons (2000): Dir: Courtney Smith / Cast: Justin Whalin, Marlon Wayans, Thora Birch, Bruce Payne, Jeremy Irons: Pathetic piece of junk that is so hideous that every copy in circulation should be used to start a campfire. Bruce Payne plays a henchmen villain trying to steal a scepter for his master. The blue lipstick does him little justice. Thora Birch plays the Empiress who must avoid a war. Justin Whalin and Marlon Wayans play a couple of thieves who get caught up in the scheme and are accompanied by a dwarf, a magician's apprentice, and elves. The screenplay is about third grade level with special effects that are about as festive as a bag of puke. Poor directing by Courtney Smith with horrible acting performances to back him up. Whalin and Wayans are horrible in what will never be a compliment to their abilities. Birch is laughable riding that flimsy magic carpet. This is a major downfall especially since the previous year she gave a flawless performance in American Beauty. Payne looks like a barbaric version of Divine with that blue lipstick. Even poor Jeremy Irons, an accomplished actor, somehow got suckered into being part of this garbage. This piece of junk is easily one of the worst films to be released this year. It is a total embarrassment to everyone involved. It is a foolish mess that should be tossed into a deep hole and buried. Score: 0 / 10

Sometimes movies, based on titles alone get unjustified reviews, this clearly isn't one of them. A hackneyed script, jolted, terrible actors, who clearly didn't attempt to put a serious professional attitude to their roles. Even a fine actor Jeremy Irons, did not buy into this, it is clearly so over the top horrible, it would be fun if it wasn't supposed to be a serious attempt at a fantasy movie. How, or why this treatment was allowed to continue after a week and wasn't totally abolished and re-cast, re-director-ed, is beyond me. I originally saw this movie in the theaters, and sometimes after time, re-watching changes impressions, this clearly did not, a review after so much time, confirmed my early memories of this move. Its just terrible, it is no where even in the top ten of all time fantasy movies, even before some of the more serious recent and more modern works have come out. The one saving grace, was this early on CGI effects, did not look that horrendous, but it didn't even have that much of it. You should have a fine balance between the two, which this movie "could" have had, if the actors and script were not just so horrible.

So Bad it's good Rating: 5/5 "Dungeons & Dragons" is a perfect example of a film that's so catastrophically awful it becomes hilarious. There isn't a single element present that is good. In the fantastical empire of Izmir, ruled by a knock-off of the child-like Empress from the "NeverEnding Story" (Thora Birch as Empress Savina), there is trouble brewing. The evil mage Profion (Jeremy Irons, acting so insanely he gives Nicholas Cage in "Wicker Man" a run for his money) and his blue-lipstick-wearing crony, Damodar (Bruce Payne) decide to steal the mystical red rod of power, which will allow them to summon the red dragons and take power by force. The protagonists of the film are Ridley (justin Whalin) and Snail (Marlon Wayans, who is so embarrassing as a sidekick he falls just short of wearing Jordans and rapping) who break into the Magic School (that's what it's really called) and get roped up with a young mage/love interest named Marina (Zoe McLellan). They meet up with a dwarf and an elf, included in the film only to make it more fantasy-like, and go on a quest to defeat the bad guys do. Expect Ridley to explore what passes as dungeons and for our heroes to battle some deadly, badly animated dragons.It's laugh-out-loud hilarious and never gets old because the picture keeps throwing new stuff at you. The acting is terrible, but in a nice variety of ways for instance. Profion is way over-the-top, waving his arms around like a madman, chanting incomprehensible spells that sound like they're being made up on the spot and twisting his face in sneers and grins. The Empress on the other hand, is so wooden you get better performances out of the animated skeleton encountered towards the last third of the film, and that guy has no face! As for the main players, several of them are incredibly bland and feel totally irrelevant to the plot. You could have easily thrown out the elf and the dwarf character because they contribute nothing at all.The story is terrible and feels like a generic fantasy film with a couple of Dungeons and Dragons elements thrown in. We've got a random monster who shows up for a single scene and then disappears, just so we can have D&D players go "I get that reference!" but otherwise the film is filled with weird-looking humanoids that would be more at home in an episode of Star Trek than in an epic fantasy film. The sets here are so incredibly cheap it is astounding. Some scenes are clearly shot against a bad green screen and you can almost see an aura surrounding characters as they talk in front of these big, elaborate castles. Other shots are clearly inside a large library or inside a cathedral that was not built for the film. It's pretty hilarious to see the camera pan around, showing elaborate paintings that in no way fit, as if the editor mistook them for some of the special effect guys' best work and said "The rest of this movie looks awful, but people have got to see this!" Mostly, "Dungeons and Dragons" is set in unconvincing dungeons, markets or forests that were probably borrowed from a TV show that had just finished wrapping up, with a bunch of random bones or skulls thrown in to look more menacing.The most memorable and laughable elements of the film have to be the special effects. I understand that this film had a somewhat limited budget, about $40 million dollars. That's not a ton of money so I don't expect the creatures here to look as good as the dinosaurs in "Jurassic Park", but this is a whole new level of bad. Someone working on this film was incredibly proud of the CG castle they built and they show it off constantly, but no matter how much you pan up and down, it still looks terrible. Even worse are the dragons. I realize that the film is called DungeonS and DragonS, but if you can barely create one CG dragon, don't include a battle where hundreds of them are flying unconvincingly, spitting fireballs at each other. One of the first scenes features a dragon being killed and the movie tells you right away it is going to be cheap, unconvincing and laughable because the dragon bleeds CG blood. Do you know how easy it is to shoot blood pooling and dripping over stone steps? You just need some corn syrup and food coloring, or at the very least some red paint! They couldn't even get that right, what hope do any of the other creatures here have? The worst offender in terms of bad costumes (most of the armor looks like spray-painted plastic) them all is the elf Norda (Kristen Wilson, looking like a Vulcan from "Star Trek"). Ever see one of those paintings, perhaps on the side of a van where a tough-looking barbarian chick has her arms in the air, swinging twin swords? Half the time she's wearing a breast plate that looks like it was painted onto her skin? This elf has exactly that. Literally, she's wearing a breast plate; complete with individual cups and a belly button for extra sexiness. It's impossible to miss because the camera constantly shows her from the neck down. Had we not received many shots of Damodar's epic codpiece, I'd call her boob-plate the most awesome piece of armor in the whole picture.Once in a while, you see a movie that's so bad it earns itself a place in the hall of fame. This is easily the worst fantasy film I've seen. It's a series of colossal mistakes immortalized on DVD and it's glorious. Forget your standard comedies with your Eddie Murphys, your Jim Carreys and your Adam Sandlers. You want to laugh long and hard? Check out "Dungeons & Dragons". I love it! (On DVD, January 24, 2014)