Yup. Agree with @KillerRabbit and @Boblawblah. Movies are always only about entertainment for me. I couldn't care less about quality writing or directing or whatever in a movie, and especially don't care about movies as "art." And cheese and silly humor are perfectly fine in movies. I also liked the old D&D movies, and will continue to like D&D movies so long as they continue to cater to ordinary people and NOT the stupid-ass movie critics.
I mean, thats fair. A lot of movies don't require anything from the audience and I can enjoy those movies too. Also I wasn't making the case that D&D movies were any sort of high Art, nor was I really holding them to that standard.
Zoolander 2 was a shit movie but I still dressed up as Mugatu and had fun. Plan 9 from Outer Space is so bad that it's become a cult classic - it's unintentionally hilarious. The standard for these movies has only ever been entertainment, and that's all I am judging them by. Watching Jeremy Irons - who is a seriously talented actor - an award winning, classically trained, Shakespearean actor basically tear up the scenery with overacting is in itself really funny shit...oh Jeremy, how did this happen my friend?
This is all completely separate from Film that allows you to engage with it as entertainment or engage with it as art. Alien, BladeRunner, and Total Recall are great examples. You can just enjoy them as entertainment or you can step into the work and engage in critical analysis and analyze/discover mise en scène, thematic elements, homages and/or you can compare it to other films.
So yeah - I can look at a film and be like "Yeah it's total trash, completely lacking any subtext or thematic consistency but it's still entertaining." So to clarify, I found D&D: Honor among Thieves to have been the MOST entertaining of the lot. It did a great job blending humor and tragedy and getting you to feel invested in the characters - but I also feel my reaction to it was what the Directors intended. Where in previous movies the hilarity was less intentional.
