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It sucked! Big time. It wasn't as bad as I expected, in the sense that it was ~80 minutes of boring and 30 minutes of stupid, rather than a full 110 minutes of stupid (the 10 minutes of credits: not bad!). But there wasn't a single moment we haven't seen elsewhere dozens of times, and it had nothing new or charming to say about any of them.
Particularly bad moments:
Characters who barely know each other spilling their tragic backstories over a campfire.
The king's brother-in-law reminding the queen "You're my sister." (Apparently he's the next ruler in the line of succession, so she might need the reminder).
A Chekov's gun of a golem who, once finally activated, spends the bulk of his time breaking a window and then walking headless into a wall like a broken Roomba.
I did lol that the she-orc's big move as new "it" girl was simply to distract Guldan long enough for the hero to jump on his gryphon and fly outta there. Now that's a solid climax for a movie whose intended sequels will never get made, in any just world. There's a few moments like that where "big" events just deflate with the bad writing, awful performances, poor plotting, and lousy direction/editing. The death of the hero's son comes to mind (the attempts to save him, decent; the reaction to his death: soooooo terrible). And the hero orc's death and beardo-orc's subsequent challenge of Guldan's leadership: so laughably & immediately shrugged off by everybody.
Good moments: The Guardian burning up all the dork wizard's research. Guldan pushing an entire cage full of POWs off a cliff. The battle in the gorge (decent, not great). The first battle in the forest: actually pretty rad, and the highlight of the whole movie. That it came so early made the rest of the movie that much more of a slog.
Anyway, it was nowhere near as bad as like D&D or anything like that. It's mostly just a mediocre chore to watch, rather than a catastrophe. But particularly bad performances and some reaaaaally bad writing do cross that line once in a while.
Particularly bad moments:
Characters who barely know each other spilling their tragic backstories over a campfire.
The king's brother-in-law reminding the queen "You're my sister." (Apparently he's the next ruler in the line of succession, so she might need the reminder).
A Chekov's gun of a golem who, once finally activated, spends the bulk of his time breaking a window and then walking headless into a wall like a broken Roomba.
I did lol that the she-orc's big move as new "it" girl was simply to distract Guldan long enough for the hero to jump on his gryphon and fly outta there. Now that's a solid climax for a movie whose intended sequels will never get made, in any just world. There's a few moments like that where "big" events just deflate with the bad writing, awful performances, poor plotting, and lousy direction/editing. The death of the hero's son comes to mind (the attempts to save him, decent; the reaction to his death: soooooo terrible). And the hero orc's death and beardo-orc's subsequent challenge of Guldan's leadership: so laughably & immediately shrugged off by everybody.
Good moments: The Guardian burning up all the dork wizard's research. Guldan pushing an entire cage full of POWs off a cliff. The battle in the gorge (decent, not great). The first battle in the forest: actually pretty rad, and the highlight of the whole movie. That it came so early made the rest of the movie that much more of a slog.
Anyway, it was nowhere near as bad as like D&D or anything like that. It's mostly just a mediocre chore to watch, rather than a catastrophe. But particularly bad performances and some reaaaaally bad writing do cross that line once in a while.
