Was the version of ‘Dungeons and Dragons’ from 2000 with Jeremy Irons that bad?

Jeremy Irons was in the process of renovating his new home, Kilcoe Castle —a 15th-century Irish fortification—, when the executive producer Joel Silver asked her to appear in an adaptation of ‘Dungeons and Dragons’. Although the Oscar-winning actor, at first, found the project unexciting, several factors brought him closer until he was fully convinced: his children’s fondness for the role-playing game on which the film was based, his friendship with Silver (with whom he had released in 1995 ‘Die Die: Revenge’) and, in particular, the possibility of obtaining a not inconsiderable economic injection for his castle. “I had to pay it off somehow.” he confessed years later in an interview with The Guardian.

It is possible that, without the difficulties of real estate management that Irons was going through and, therefore, without his concurrence, the movie ‘Dungeons and Dragons’ of the year 2000 would have gone unnoticed and few remembered its existence in the context of the premiere of the new version. For obvious reasons, the criticism of ‘Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves’, the promised adventure, has been much more positive for many of his fans. John Francis Daley and Jonathan M. Goldstein film has grossed in a single weekend in the United States more of what that adaptation did in his entire commercial career. However, the inordinate acting effort that the British actor put into his work has ensured that, more than 20 years later, the flame of memory of a rather discreet production is still very much alive.

That the person who, in principle, cared less about ‘Dungeons and Dragons’ ended up being the one who wanted the matter the most defines what happened quite well. With epoch-making overacting, Jeremy Irons played the villain, the evil wizard Profion, and had an undeniably better time than most people who made or saw the movie. It is probable that he thinks, glass of wine in hand from his medieval tower, that he was the only one who was worth being there: then-rising star Justin Whalin retired from acting, director Courtney Solomon was no longer in any major projects, and the franchise, conceived as a trilogy, was completed in a domestic format. Those two additional movies are largely unknown to mainstream audiences, and it’s easy to understand why: they don’t have Jeremy Irons.

“May the blood of dragons rain from the sky!”

Courtney Solomon was a young Canadian from a well-to-do family with little experience and a lot of ambition. Not too many people are able to start in the industry by opening their own production company at just 19 years old and acquiring the rights to a game as popular as ‘Dungeons and Dragons’, as was the case in 1990. His mother was the production coordinator Fran Solomon, while his own grandfather signed a bank loan to support him financially. It was not a studio production, much less a blockbusters: ‘Dungeons and Dragons’ is an independently financed film, at the time the most expensive in history, with a 35 million dollar budget.

With no previous titles under his belt, Solomon also had no plans to direct the film. With an amateur vision, but also with a business motivation and ownership of the rights, the young man moved his idea through different majors along with a list of possible directors as optimistic as unconscious, which, among others, included Francis Ford Coppola and James Cameron. Finally, the only but not insignificant endorsement he achieved was that of Joel Silver, producer of action films like the triumphant duo of 1987 ‘Lethal Weapon’ and ‘Predator’, which is still a classic 30 years later, or, later, ‘The Matrix’ (1999). Silver thought that ‘Dungeons and Dragons’ was not a bad intellectual property to be associated with and that the bad commercial moment that fantasy was going through in the nineties was close to ending, taking into account the revival that promised the announcement of the ‘Star Wars’ prequel trilogy. And, ultimately, the George Lucas saga was, in fact, the mold from which Solomon intended to approach the film.

the canadian got so involved in ‘Dungeons and Dragons’ that It cost him his relationship with his longtime girlfriend. Already oscillating between direct-to-video film and television series, Silver asked Solomon for a sample test of what he had in mind, saw potential as a feature film, and eventually he made the young man wrap the blanket over his head and end up shooting it himself for two months in the Czech Republic, to save taxes, and in days of between 15 and 19 hours.

The final script mixed, According to the director’s statements, the best scenes of the 16 drafts that the production had in total. His version took as reference one of the less famous settings of the game, that of Mystara, although he was only superficially inspired by it, since the belief that less familiar viewers would not connect if he went into too much detail. Nor is it that money was left over to afford such details. For its part, the New Line Cinema label, which only a year later was going to release ‘The Lord of the Rings’, the trilogy that changed everything, bought the distribution rights to bring the film to theaters at Christmas 2000. .

born anachronistic

Before critics destroyed the film and the public ignored it, Solomon was so convinced of the virtues of his film that, in an interview, he even mocked Jar Jar Binks from ‘The Phantom Menace’ (1999) or of the aspect of the dragon of ‘Dragonheart (Dragon Heart)’ (1996). But the rarefied lace of humor —served, in his case, not by Jar Jar Binks, but by Marlon Wayans— or the ugly appearance of the CGI dragons ended up being, precisely, some of the aspects that led to ‘Dungeons and Dragons’ obtaining an awful reception.

Viewed today, it’s easy to perceive the product as immediately before ‘The Lord of the Rings’: its references are the light fantasies of the eighties and its television derivatives of the nineties, without the sense of gravity or the sometimes cumbersome encyclopedic rigor with which projects of this type would be approached after the success of Peter Jackson. It is an element that, curiously, resembles the film of 2000 and that of 2023, with the difference that this treatment was, at that time, conventional, while now, after exhaustion from the epic adventure and by imitators as languid as ‘Eragon ‘ (2006), it’s cooler. Jeremy Irons (who, by the way, was also in ‘Eragon’), with his cartoonish performance as the terrifying character of the Hammer, he was the one who seemed to understand the knockdown condition best of the material, which was left in no-man’s-land between its will to be the new ‘Star Wars’ and its latent base of a riotous B-series.

Also as in the new film, Solomon opted to move part of the logic of the game and pose a plot in constant motion, as if its characters were rolling dice and going from one point to another to complete small missions, within another global mission. However, the rugged narrative tone created a sense of dispersion more than anything else, with characters that came and went without really knowing who they were or what they were doing and very vague rules. Bruce Payne (only actor to reprise in its direct-to-video sequel) in the role of henchman with blue lips and what appear to be snails coming out of his ears is the other big claim kitsch of a film that was impossible to work in 2000, because its codes were already anachronistic then.

Claiming it or finding someone to claim it is not an easy task. Journalist Dustin Pinney, of Movieweb, found an argument in the diversity of its cast, more than two decades before some viewers of ‘The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power’ (2022) considered a drama that an elf was black. For any Irons fan, obviously, it’s a must-read and a master class in professional engagement. For the rest, surely, the new audience that has discovered ‘Dungeons and Dragons’, either because of the new life it has acquired through the gaming in networks or for his appearance in the fourth season of ‘Stranger Things’ (2022), he will find the recently released film with Chris Pine more satisfactory.

However, it is true that rescuing the first film version is peeking into a production that retains a certain enjoyable charm trash, for having been brought forward by force, being full of firefighter ideas, having its actors convinced that they are in films that are aggressively different from each other, or wanting to please incongruously as generously and honestly, even without the means or the talent, an audience that at the time was not interested in fantasy. Just like Jeremy Irons keeps his castle in Ireland and, nowadays, also the little island next to it, as confirmed last year.