Not another Hobbit movie
You don’t need more Hobbit in your life.
If the stretch marks weren’t already obvious, they certainly are now. The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies takes perhaps an hour’s worth of material and expands it into a hysterical yet preposterously dreary two-and-a-half-hour slog.
The Lord of the Rings was not without its foibles, but every moment of cheesiness or bombast felt earned. In contrast, The Battle of the Five Armies drowns in its own wretched excess. Every cool moment in the film is followed by a never-ending cavalcade of similar moments, like a crude mixtape of The Two Towers and The Return of the King set on infinite loop.
The film opens on the ending of its predecessor, with Smaug burning the ever-loving crap out of Lake-town. It’s an exciting enough start that’s over all too soon when Bard (Luke Evans, Dracula Untold) puts an end to the dragon’s reign of terror, kicking off the actual movie.
Some still-interchangeable dwarves bicker amongst themselves over a huge stash of gold or something under the mountain while the human survivors of Lake-town connive with the elf jerk from the last movie to forcibly take the gold from the dwarves. All the while, that orc fellow from the first movie plots to ambush everyone in the middle of the fracas.
Thus begins the titular battle of the five armies, which plays out less like the epic climax of a trilogy and more like a two-hour moneyshot. Writer/director Peter Jackson (The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug) struggles to find some human element to serve as a compass through the mayhem, but he keeps coming up empty.
Howard Shore’s (The Desolation of Smaug) score manfully strives to sell the romance between human-looking dwarf (Aidan Turner, The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones) and generic female elf (Evangeline Lilly, Real Steel), but Jackson’s script offers nothing more than tired, generic platitudes about love that verge on being outright embarrassing. The repeated cutaways to Bard doing some bland action-hero stuff with his family is also a complete nonstarter, while the comic relief character annoys from the get-go.
Even Bilbo (Martin Freeman, Sherlock), the character after which the book was named, barely registers as a presence. Bilbo’s entire character arc already happened in the first film, so he has become a bystander in his own story. For a good 30 or so minutes, I completely forgot he existed.
The movie’s ending is dragged out, per Jackson’s modus operandi, with the film finally concluding with a half-hearted wraparound to The Fellowship of the Ring that makes the whole franchise feel like a cheap TV-movie prequel to the actual Lord of the Rings.
The Battle of the Five Armies was supposed to be an explosive, triumphant send-off to Middle-earth. Instead, by the time credits rolled, I was just glad that it’s all finally over.
