Dungeons & Dragons (2000)

   Great Gary Gygax, this is a terrible movie.  I would rather have watched people fill out character sheets for two hours.  Oh yeah, because I have actually played Dungeons & Dragons.  Second and Third editions.  So I know what the hell I'm talking about.

Long ago in the land of whothefuckcares, an evil mage named Profion (Jeremy Irons, who clearly lost a bet) tried to overthrow the empress (Thora Birch, what the hell happened to you?).  To do this, he needed a magic scepter that could control dragons, the location of which could only be found in an ancient scroll.  A young mage named Marina (Zoe McLellan) worked in the library and managed to get the scroll before two idiot thieves, Ridley (Justin Whalen) and Snails (Marlon Wayans), could steal it.  They weren't working for Profion, they just wanted to get some XP and level up so Ridley could buy that Bag of Holding that would match his Seven League Boots.  What's up, nerds?

Anyway, the three adventurers add a random dwarf (Lee Arenberg) to their party, because I'm pretty sure that's a requirement, and set off for the scepter.  The empress sends her best tracker, an elf (Kristen Wilson), who -- let's be real here -- is really just a half-elf with delusions of grandeur.  Profion sends his own goon (Bruce Payne), whose makeup game remains on point throughout, after the party.  Blah blah, random stuff, blah blah happy ending.

The worst part about this movie isn't the terrible CGI, the cartoonish dragons, the stains on otherwise excellent actors' resumes, it's the generic sadness of it all.  I have seen movies based on role-playing games.  They were not well-made and probably had a fraction of the budget this did, but I could tell that they were made by people who sincerely loved the game and what it meant to them.  This was a paint-by-numbers fantasy film that just happened to have the name of a long-running game attached to it.  There was nothing about it that definitively said that this had anything to do with D&D except a blurb in the credits thanking E. Gary Gygax.  This was a cheap money grab by a third-rate director and two fledgling writers.  Avoid.