2.25/5
Reviewed May 16, 2024
Decided to watch Tom Hanks’ first leading role in this old TV movie, made in the same vein as Reefer Madness. A new guy at a college falls in with a trio of Mazes and Monsters players (clearly DnD during Satanic Panic days). He dates one of them while their games become a frequent part of everyone’s lives. However, unresolved mental health issues from his youth pop in and start distorting Tom’s sense of reality, causing him to go on a wild adventure to dangerous places….
It’s a TV movie and the production value is pretty terrible. It was clearly made with the intention to make DnD look like you’d lose your mind if you played it, but it honestly makes it look cool as heck (the characters play by candlelight, make elaborate scenarios, and eventually do legit LARPing of a campaign in a dangerous cave).
Three of the four leads (Hanks, Wendy Crewson, and David Wysocki) all went on to have OK careers (obviously Tom is a superstar), which is surprising for a cheap film like this. There’s a lot of poor acting – not so much by Tom – along with crappy costumes, tons of ultra-poorly lit scenes, bad sound work, bad camera work, lots of background filler scenes, you name it. But somehow…the third act gets you legit endeared to the story and you begin to lose yourself in the film like Tom loses himself in the fantasy land.
A smarter version of this would tackle mental health issues, as all four characters suffer from at least something wrong (esteem, poor relationships, suicidal thoughts, youth trauma). There’s definitely something to each of them, but only our main character gets significant time to explore it, and only then for the purposes of losing grip on reality. The sequences where he goes to the city and is fading in and out of sanity…those are really good and absolutely worth dealing with a terrible opening section to get to. I also particularly enjoy the ending and how bittersweet it is.
It’s overall not a good movie, but there’s definitely some interesting aspects to it (and some cool LARPing before that was a huge deal) that make it worth seeing. If nothing else, it’s Hanks’ first leading role and that counts for something.
Getting Reel with Mr. Sunshine 