The acting was terrible - in particular Portman and Lloyd. The characters were one-dimensional. I didn't care what happened to them. I felt no connection. Half of them served no purpose at all, other than to advertise the software that created them or to sell toys or Halloween costume tie-ins. The story is that poorly written - what little story there is.
I had gone to see it out of curiosity. Afterwards, I knew I wouldn't be bothering with the next two.
[rant]
Something that is particularly glaring, acting\writing-wise is George's inability to write a few lines of dialogue beyond the point in a sentence where someone is interrupted. I was reading a piece by Brian Daley where he explained how he wrote lines of dialogue and included sentence structure beyond where a person is to be interrupted while talking. It makes the interruption real - the first person is still talking for a moment while the second person interrupts the dialogue.
When George writes the screenplay or script, the character pauses and waits for their interruption. It feels unnatural. With George, characters are never interrupted - they just have weird sounding pauses while they wait to be interrupted. He sure as hell didn't get any help from Portman or Lloyd either. They're two of the worst. They just read the script, without depth, without feeling.
In Star Wars, Carrie Fisher and Harrison Ford are particularly good at that kind of interaction - whereas, in Phantom, Portman and Lloyd are uncomfortably bad at it.
[/rant]
My point with including that rant, by the way, is that the terrible acting is one of the things that stood out the most when I first saw Phantom.