Sy-Fy Presents: Generic Fantasy Flick W/C-List Actors!

The cons: The cast, the writing, and the video game CGI.

The mage was fucking terrible, just terrible. His look, his demeanor, his dialogue, the way he delivered his dialogue, everything about him was third rate. It’s like some token, obligatory “producer” with stroke had a theater geek son who was super duper into WOW and the only way to get this thing greenlit was to include him. Did he write his own shitty Fantasy 101 dialogue too?

Ben Foster was terrible. Just terrible. He’s getting a razzy for this. He was a horrible casting choice. They may as well have cast Nicholas Cage.

Paula Patton? Inspired choice, horrendous execution. Nearly as bad as Halle’s turn as Catwoman.

Anyhow this list goes on. The writing is awful and the entire cast looks and feels like third, fourth, and fifth choices.

The other issue is, well, WarCraft itself. Everything has an absurdly cheesy generic fantasy name. Storm Wind! This stuff takes a bad, cheesy, schlocky, gimmicky mess of a movie that much worse, though they’d be hardly noticeable if everything else was up to snuff.

There’s also incredibly annoying, stupid character stuff. Anduin’s dislike for the mage never makes any real sense. Actually, everyone is needlessly mean to the mage for the first half of the film.

******

The pros? The story and plot are solid. They don't connect all the dots all that well, particularly with the mages.

What’s fucked about all of this is they DID put together a relatively compelling story. I liked the story and I liked the dynamics between most of the main characters, aside from the horrendously written and acted mages. The one character I genuinely enjoyed throughout was Durotan and he holds this together pretty well. Oh, and his baby.

BABY ORC TOTALLY PWNS, MAN. I’m not even joking. I fucking loved that thing. I’m gonna watch the sequel (China is making that happen as we speak) just to see if we get some time for the baby Orc.

They wrote a story that should have made a good movie but a third rate cast (Apologies to Ben Foster and Dominic Cooper but nah… those guys aren’t carrying a movie like this) and awful dialogue killed this in a bad way. The cartoony CGI would have been mostly forgivable were it not for such bad writing. The plot works for me though and I managed to come away invested in the story just enough to want to see what happens next to these two worlds.

Oh, and baby orc. Because he fucking PWNS, BRO.

Seriously. The baby orc is fantastic.