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List Price: $12.97 | | Label: New Line Home Video
Salesrank: 34429
Released: May 22, 2001 |
| Our Price: $1.40 |
| Used Price: $0.01 |
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MPAA Rating: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Media: DVD |
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Editorial Review:
IN THIS THRILLING ADVENTURE, MAGIC, DRAGONS AND HEROES BRING THE WORLD'S GREATEST ROLE PLAYING GAME TO LIFE, AS THE FORCES OF GOOD AND EVIL DO BATTLE FOR CONTROL OF AN ENCHANTED LAND.
Description of Dungeons & Dragons (New Line Platinum Series):
There is trouble in Izmer. With the emperor dead from an assassin's poison, the 16-year-old princess Savina (Thora Birch) inherits not just the throne but also the royal scepter, which has the power to command gold dragons. With a youthful idealism, she decides all people should be equal, from lowly commoners to the ruling-class, magic-wielding mages. This doesn't sit well with the mages, so Archmage Profion (Jeremy Irons) leads a revolt in the Council against Savina's rule, forcing her to relinquish the royal scepter. In order to maintain her power, she decides she needs the rod of Savrille, which can control red dragons. To retrieve it, she hires two bumbling thieves, Ridley (Justin Whalin) and Snails (Marlon Wayans), and an apprentice mage (Zoe McLellan). The true trouble in Izmer is the fact that it's a poorly imagined world that cribs more from Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark than it does from the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game that shares its title. Director Courtney Solomon optioned the rights to the game in 1991, when he was 21, and should have spent the years since then drafting a coherent script. Mediocre special effects take precedence over story, and the actors try to make up for that by hamming it up. Irons, in particular, covers his embarrassment by chewing the scenery and spitting it out. Often unintentionally funny, Dungeons & Dragons is that fun kind of bad movie, whose cult status would be all but guaranteed if it weren't for a slow second act mired in the boring bumbling of the awkward thieves. Still, there are plenty of laughs to be had. --Andy Spletzer
Dungeons & Dragons (New Line Platinum Series) Reviews:
Worst Movie EVER!!!!!!!!!!!! 
2009-11-14 - I saw this as a teenager and it made me sick. I tried to watch it again on cable TV as an adult and it STILL sucks!
Easily the Worst Movie I Have Seen to Date
2009-10-09 - It has been many years since I watched this travesty of a film, but even after thousands of competitors, I still find Dungeons & Dragons to be the worst film I have seen. As a big fan of the D&D game (I grew up playing it for years) I had high hopes for the movie. A budget of 35 Million dollars at the time was quite a lot of money, and Jeremy Irons is one of my favorite actors (for Irons at his best, try the original Brideshead Revisited miniseries). It gives me no pleasure to pan the film, or Irons' performance in it, but there is just no other way... they just were both *terrible*. With cheezy special effects, ridiculous dialogue and acting that is scary bad, you wind up with one big mess. My favorite line from Irons as Profion was "I'm looking for my stone... I want my stone!" You can imagine with dialogue like *that,* the actors did not have a chance. Avoid at all cost.
Garbage
2009-03-19 - Despite the fact that I think this film rates lower than an otyugh's stool (D&D nerd reference there), I have seen it more times than I care to remember. I saw it once on a date at the cinema (she liked it), and a couple of times on video/dvd when I was trying to show just how horrible it was to friends. It is a film that gets worse with every viewing. There is always something new to be appalled by every time you watch it.
Do not own this movie, it will infect other movies you own with its badness. Even milk will go off in close proximity to this drek. If (like me) you are a completist and have to see it "just to see what they did", borrow it or hire it (but then complain that the disc wouldn't play on your machine so that you can exchange it for something else).
This movie commits the cardinal sin of being boring. It has a clunky script, questionable costume choices and as an adaptation of D&D, unforgivable. I know nothing about how to light a movie set, so when I notice that a scene has no atmosphere, there's something wrong.
The cast could or might be OK in other circumstances, but with rubbish lines and a bad director, are left to flounder. I don't think I've seen Thora Birch since. Jeremy Irons, rather than flounder, clearly went insane for the duration of this shoot. His performance is, ahhh... colourful. Olivier's Richard the Third on crack? X 1000?
The extras of this give a fairly good picture of why this film stinks. Yes, I watched them. The director's mummy bought him the director's chair, and he clearly shouldn't be trusted with sharp objects, let alone Jeremy Irons. Although the director professes a love of D&D, he clearly was never a dungeon master or ever read a fantasy book. And therein lies the problem with basing a film on D&D; the game is based on any number of sources and worlds, so what do you choose?
And where were the monsters? D&D if its about anything, is about the monsters! OK we had some 2nd drawer CGI dragons (they're a given), and a beholder very shyly ran across screen in one scene, but what about the rest?! Where were the gnolls, bugbears, gelatinous cubes (OK, they are silly), etc?
See Lord of the Rings. Even see Uwe Boll's In the Name of the King. It's better than this unflushable horror.
IRONS & DUNGEONS & DRAGONS -- Oh my!!! 
2008-05-02 - Once upon a time in a land not so far away, a callow youth named Courtney Solomon had a dream. So he saved his pennies and at the tender age of 20, secured the film rights to DUNGEONS & DRAGONS, and thence pursued his Holy Grail: a big-screen version of the much-loved neo-medieval role-playing game. For 10 long years he wandered in the Holly Wood in search of the all-important Green Light, until one day he chanced upon the Lord of High Concepts (Sir Joel of the Silver). A meeting was taken and thence, "a Courtney Solomon film" was born.
Talented actors signed on for big paychecks, but now, so close to his dream, the novice filmmaker refused to allow his vision to pass into the hands of those more experienced, and he himself assumed the director's chair. Some $43 million later, he had his tale of the fair Empress of Izmer, whose rule is threatened by an evil mage, or magician. With the help of a dwarf, an elf, an apprentice mage and two thieves, disaster was averted . . . in Izmer. (Alas, the same can not be said of the tale itself, which stinketh like the breath of a dyspeptic dragon.) But for we collectors of BAD MOVIES WE LOVE, there is a happier ending.
Laboriously expository and defiantly incomprehensible, DUNGEONS & DRAGONS seems to involve the hunt for an enchanted "rod," a threat to the prevailing "fabric of magic," the fight for democracy in the kingdom of Izmer, and the ritual humiliation of actors. In ascending order of ignominy: haughty apprentice mage bland Zoe McLellan; Skywalkerish commoner Justin Whalin (the new Sean Patrick Flanery or the new Robert Sean Leonard? Discuss); his bumbling sidekick Marlon Wayans (a black character straight out of Hollywood's 1938 playbook); Glenn Close-channeling Jeremy Irons; and fair-minded empress Thora Birch, (who models a series of headpieces cribbed from '70s disco album sleeves and throughout sustains the impression of having learned her lines phonetically.)
Those schooled in the arcana of the phenomenally successful fantasy role playing game can best rule on whether Solomon's live action adaptation is a faithful depiction of its obsessive world of elves, dwarfs, and winged things, but even a babe in dungeonland can see that the leading fire breather in this malty brew of heroics and minutiae isn't a computer generated creature, but Jeremy Irons as the archvillain Profion. All goggle-eyes, exaggerated double takes and full-throated oratory, Irons howls, whispers and rages, as he struts about in Olivier's 'Hamlet' eyeliner. Luxuriously bellowing immortal lines like ''You! Are! Mine! Now!', he attacks and guzzles every shred of scenery as if he were playing King Lear at a suburban community theater. "With a dragon army at my command I can crush the empress!" he cries joyfully, bending at the waist and making little claws out of his hands. (It's Bad Movie Nirvana!)
As Irons henchman Damodar, Bruce Payne runs a close second. A bald and burly centurion, Payne goes through the movie wearing metallic blue lipstick, (an obvious but puzzling reference to Petula Clark), terrorizing heroes Whalin and Wayans, whose destiny is to save the world - or whatever.
With his long, chestnut lashes, cherubic cheeks and silky complexion, Whalen is significantly prettier than his female love interest - wholesome, magic-wielding librarian Zoe McLellan. Aided by a lissome elf and a grumpy dwarf, our heroes embark on a quest involving glowing rubies and secret scrolls. McLellan decides to join them, and after she kisses Whalen her glasses disappear and her backswept math-girl hairdo is magically transformed into a hipper center-part. Our heroic group must battle Payne for possession of a powerful thingummy that can control red dragons, which may or may not be bigger and meaner than the regular green kind. The thingummy itself is called a "rod," but strongly resembles our friend's old Dragon Bong. (A connection to the true Dungeons & Dragons universe at last!)
Watch for an imitation STAR WARS bar scene and ex-'Doctor Who', Tom Baker, as a wise elf.
Dungeons and Dragon DVD 
2008-01-18 - I bought this DVD as a gift. The case was in horrible condition; it had stickers and tape all over it. I only paid a penny for it, so it was worth the price.
