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

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)

I didn't think it was too bad of a movie, although I have to agree with a few people about some roles that may as well not have been there. I think much of the venom is about this not being related to the Dungeons & Dragons series or game.Most of the main roles are played by teenagers, so this would suit as a family movie for children who aren't young enough for Disney cartoons but old enough for some live action that won't give them nightmares.Acting is overall pretty good. It doesn't feel like a budget movie, and certainly doesn't show to be a budget movie with the dragons. You really do feel that they put a good amount of effort to make everything look convincingly realistic, but what is disappointing is that half the cast don't even have a role. They'll do or say something once or twice but they hardly do or say anything else that actually contributes their character to the movie. You start to forget they're actually there as the movie is centred on the main hero, girlfriend, and protagonists.And as for the ending it was something that was slapped in a year later without thinking about how the audience is going to relate it to any part of the movie. It leaves you confused asking yourself what just happened because it didn't happen anywhere else in the movie and there's no reference anywhere to explain why it would happen. It was an effort to make it not seem as depressing but the writer should've at least have thought of adding something somewhere else in the movie to explain why it ended like it did or an explanation at the very end instead of "don't question the gift you've been given." In fact it seems that there is a lot of unanswerable questions in the movie with the excuse that it's not to be questioned, and it leaves you a bit frustrated because you want answers to understand the movie, not to be left guessing why some people weren't allowed to help or why things happened the way they did. It becomes nonsensical jibber jabber that screams out badly written because the author couldn't be bothered to put in an explanation and left it to our imagination, but there's only so much our imagination can tell us and without any clues anywhere else you may as well say "they can't help rescue the girl because they ate bread for breakfast."

Though not a good movie as the acting is hammy, the characters somewhat stereotyped or annoying but I find this movie is a perfect example of an actual game of D&D where people are role playing, yes the script is terrible but so are most attempts at conversation between PC's and NPC's in a D&D game, yes some jokes don't work or are obvious what's going to happen, but that happens around the table, yes it blatantly rips some scenes from other movies, yet again speaking as both a game master and a player that happens all the time in D&D games and yes, the villains are ridiculous and immensely incompetent but again that happens all the time in actual D&D games. I choose to view the movie in one of two ways, either as a cheesy movie to laugh at with friends, or to view it as the minds eye of a bunch of people around a table playing dungeons and dragons. Yes it's by no means a good film, but for me it falls in the "So bad it's good" category with the above relations to an average d&d game as a pleasant side note.