War Machine Review: 4 Ups & 5 Downs

2. The Pointless, Lazy Voiceover Narration

Though voiceover narration can be a fine asset in a movie (The Shawshank Redemption, for example), it's often an indication of a lazy screenwriter who can't find a way to organically structure their story and so relies on a disembodied voice to spoonfeed the audience everything they need to know.

Such is the case here, as the movie is framed by the narration of Sean Cullen (Scott McNairy), a Rolling Stone writer who joins McMahon's outfit in order to write a story on them.

It's not simply that the script fails to make the voiceover funny or interesting, but that McNairy's delivery is so flat and one-note that one almost suspects he was dragged into a recording booth after the fact, perhaps in order to clarify certain plot points in post-production. It's really not good, not at all.