Put in a lisence from the most widely known game system around, a bad guy with a sore throat, his henchman Lord of the Purple Lips, and the expected gang of upstart adventurers straight out of Dragon Magazine, and you pretty much got this movie... In both it's good and bad parts.

While the visuals were great and the concept of a good fantasy flick is unquestioned, the writers were obvioiusly hamstrung by having to deal within the given franchise. Many elements in the dialog was forced as they worked in as many gaming terms as possible instead of letting the conversation flow more naturally. Jeremy Irons is a good villian... when you can hear him. The music is so loud at times, that his sore-throated chatracter never got half his lines heard anytime there was supposed to be dramatic tension. Add in a plot that could have done with about 20 more minutes of plot development, and you got a film whose potential was much better then the final result.

Even some of the characters looked like bad drawings out of the gaming books- like someone just took a straight snapshot and put it in a costum(as example, I give you their version of an Elf- straight out of the Ranger class), and many had no more character and personality then said drawings. A far better way would have been to drop all the D and D references and let the script writers and costumers do their work. They didn't need the name recognition of the game to make a movie like this work. The sound track was good though (at times, that was nearly all I could hear).

In summary, about the only thing wrong with this movie was the inclusion of the Dungeons and Dragons franchise into the concept (any more D and D terms in there and I would have expected the TM trademark sybol to start floating around the characters' heads). Good special effects, great concept, lack-luster follow through. They should have stuck with just playing the game and not filming it.