6) The Acting
Predictably, when the Warcraft characters are so poorly written and the script is just so plainly bad, you get below-par acting to go along with it. Toby Kebbell and Robert Kozinsky, as our two orc heroes, do well enough with the shoddy material they’ve been handed, but everyone else fares dreadfully.
The best that can be said about anyone other than Kebbell and Kozinsky is that Ruth Negga and Ben Schnetzer are usually wonderful actors who’ve been miscast. Otherwise, Travis Fimmel, Paula Patton, Dominic Cooper and the usually reliable Ben Foster are outstandingly bad. If you want to see what pay check acting looks like, here it is.
5) The Accents
No actor is on the same page in Warcraft, and arguably nowhere is this more evident than in the accents the various cast members use. Rather than go for a standard dialect to lend the film some coherence, everyone is speaking something different in this movie.
Ben Foster, Ben Schnetzer and Paula Patton, American, all use their native accents. Dominic Cooper, Toby Kebbell and Robert Kazinsky, use English. Ruth Negga, meanwhile, speaks with an Irish accent, while Travis Fimmel, Australian, never seems to know what accent he’s doing. Put it all together, and you get a perplexing sound soup, the various ingredients never coming together to make anything satisfying.