Video game movies are not good; like none of them are good. Mortal Kombat is more on the side of it's so bad it's good because it's cheesy. Everything else either abolishes the source material or just plain sucks. There are two massive video game film adaptations releasing this year, and one is right around the corner and sadly some early reviews suggest the film is… well it's not very good.
The film currently averages out to a 38% from 8 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes but more will probably be added soon. Below you will find some excerpts from both positive and negative reviews (but mostly negative).
"Boasting more than 2,000 visual effects shots, it’s dispiriting to think about the time, energy, planning and precision that went into “Warcraft” when the final product brings to mind those animated advertisements for iPhone app games. So good at making the most outlandish elements of his first two films seem completely credible, Jones can’t find a way to get this cartoony spectacle to soar. His heartfelt approach to the material only underlines the silliness."
"Imagine 'Battlefield Earth' without the verve and you get this sludgy, tedious fantasy adventure, a fun-starved dud that’s not even unintentionally hilarious."
"Ten years after game maker Blizzard Entertainment announced its intention to take the megahit multimedia property Warcraft to the big screen, it arrives in a striking blend of pricey practical and digital effects."
"… part of the problem with Warcraft: there’s a lot going on and yet we’re never quite engaged with it. In The Lord of the Rings, we had the Shire, the Hobbits’ idyllic pastoral realm, as an image of what everyone was fighting for – one that 20th-century Europeans could easily relate to. Here, we barely see Azeroth outside the royal castles and wizards’ towers and epic battlegrounds. The heavy use of CGI, and its occasionally awkward interactions with the live-action elements, only serves to distance us even more. Much processing power has been put in the service of spectacular, bludgeoning combat, but the images are somehow insubstantial, and we rarely feel the heat of the battle."
"The orcs, wizards and warriors of Warcraft clomp determinedly onto the big screen in Legendary Pictures’ live-action take on the 20-year-old video game series. The result is a 3D sword-and-sorcery adventure whose CG-heavy look and cartoonish action should work for gamers and hardcore genre fans, even if the flat-footed drama may put off mainstream audiences and limits the chances of the property – already turned into novels and comic books – becoming a long-running movie franchise."
"Rather than tapping into the goofy core that makes a game like World of Warcraft interesting, the Warcraft movie aims for grittiness, missing the mark quite a bit. It just doesn’t work. The lore is too campy. This is a world where a mage’s most popular spell transforms his enemies into sheep, yet Warcraft acts as if it’s a green-screen version of Game of Thrones. At my theater, the biggest laughs came not from the occasional bouts of slapstick comedy but from the miserable archmages of Dalaran, whose CGI-enhanced eyes look especially absurd when you’re supposed to take them seriously.
I had hoped Warcraft would at a minimum be entertaining, but really, I’ve had more enjoyable two-hour sessions wiping on Molten Core. At least the armor looks good."
So for all you guys who waited a decade to see this movie, sorry. If you're looking for a dumb action movie, maybe this one will be for you! Warcraft releases in theaters June 10th, 2016.
