Not learning from Batman vs Superman they take too many new characters, new locations, new powers, new back story, new ideas and throw them all at you in rapid succession, and then hope that you are so busy digesting all of these that you ignore the holes in the plot, the lack of development of most of the major characters and the blatant rip-offs from Lord of the Rings.
I want to give them credit for the special effects, but they still looked like computer game special effects. In some parts they were fabulous, in others they were 'lacking'. In particular on the lacking side were the dwarves with the funny shaped heads, this was especially telling as we know that a bit of forced perspective and a decent director can turn the tallest cast member into a dwarf well (LOTR again). There were a couple of things that I couldn't tell if they were CGI or physical effects and I am going to give the CGI guys the benefit of the doubt and assume the shoddy rubber elf ears were a physical. The floppy swords and the obviously plastic armour definitely were.
A couple of other things kept bugging me about the film and I realised too often that I was distracted by them and pushed out of the story. The hipster beards just annoyed me, Ben Foster and his character almost got away with it but the other male leads just looked stupid. And Ben Foster gave me a different problem, in that I kept wondering why Lance Armstrong was wearing a hoodie and pretending to be an evil wizard.
The female characters, from a movie based on a computer game, I expected to be over-sexualised, and instead I didn't think any of them were even portrayed as mildly attractive. Maybe that was just my expectations being set incorrectly.
The balance of powers was severely mismanaged, some of the creatures were ridiculously over-powered, which led to a deus ex machina issue with the lead flying half the length of the country, (with no shoes on) in a couple of minutes, on his gryphon which then easily shreds dozens of the Orcs. Why were the gryphons not included in the army if they are so powerful, and we know he has more than one because he mentions them earlier, and why did it take so long to get Intel if they are so fast? Similarly if the Orcs are storming all over the country crushing anything that stands, why are they still all back at their camp whenever the story justifies it?
And those sort of things just bugged me, again and again, throughout the entire film.
Oh, and I almost forgot, (actually I did forget for a week and came back to add this) 30 uncredited seconds of Glenn Close that you might miss if you aren't watching closely.
Overall 5 out of 10, and a decent amount of money bet on the next in the series never getting past a rumour.
