The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies Movie Review

For the third and final installment in Peter Jackson’s bloated trilogy, The Hobbit, I couldn’t bear to sit through An Unexpected Journey and The Desolation of Smaug to refresh my memory before trudging through the morass of The Battle of the Five Armies. The predictable result is that I had completely forgotten who some secondary characters were, what they had done previously, and why I should care about them at all.

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug Movie Review

Each of these dwarfs is just like the others...

As if the first chapter weren’t already interminable enough, the second part of The Hobbit has arrived. This one, subtitled The Desolation of Smaug, is the insufferable middle section of a trilogy that had no business being, at most, a single three hour movie. Like The Two Towers a decade ago, it’s a movie without beginning or conclusion and so it just feels like you’re awash in stuff that happens to characters. Only it’s far worse than The Two Towers because that was at least based on a book of its own whereas this is from part of a single book with lots of additional crap thrown in.

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey Movie Review

Peter Jackson’s expansion of his mega-profitable behemoth of a franchise has gone from being a labor of love and an astounding cinematic adaptation of a beloved trilogy of books to a cynically calculated cash grab. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is just the first in a three part film adaptation of Tolkien’s single book prequel to The Lord of the Rings. Clocking in at just under three hours, it is already nearly twice the length of the 1977 animated version that was already a decent adaptation.