The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies

Film (2014)

With Ian McKellen (Gandalf), Martin Freeman (Bilbo Baggins), Richard Armitage (Thorin), Ken Stott (Balin), Orlando Bloom (Legolas), Evangeline Lilly (Tauriel), Cate Blanchett (Galadriel)

Smaug, the horrible fire breathing dragon is terrorizing the countryside, and that’s just the pre-title prelude. Hours of warfare between elves, dwarves and orcs follow with non-stop CGI carnage. Bilbo rides innocently throughout and lands back in the Shire only to find his possessions being auctioned off.

If you light fighting, this film is for you. It goes on more or less continually for the two and a half hours of this concluding part of the big film lollapalooza of the relatively teeny novel The Hobbit.

The first of the films in this trilogy was pretty bad, and the second pretty good. This one is pretty meh, with a lot of onscreen action that winds up being boring because nothing punctuates it.

The overall problem is that Peter Jackson has blown a short book into a huge film and it just doesn’t work. I know devotees of Tolkien who seem thrilled that Jackson has included every last detail from the book into the film. If, like me, you appreciate Tolkien but don’t have the works committed to memory, the appeal of this might be far more slight. It is sort of fun to watch the CGI magic unfold, with arrays of armed elves looking like something out of Triumph of the Will (1935), and a dragon that is truly terrifying.

I love that Benedict Cumberbatch plays the dragon. He is just everywhere these days, and it’s nice to know that he’s screening both as Alan Turing in The Imitation Game and here as Smaug at the same time. A dragon and a British closeted gay computer genius – that’s what I call range.

Martin Freeman is a delightful Bilbo, but so delightful and noble that one truly worries, given the later, sinister portrayal of Bilbo by Ian Holm, what trouble that darn ring has been up to. Perhaps Jackson can next do a series called In Treatment: Bilbo on the Couch which may yield some insights.

Iam McKellen is his usual great Gandalf self, and there are plenty of cute elves running around. A nice touch to this episode is the love affair between an elvish girl and a dwarfish guy, a sort of Romeo and Juliet for the Middle Earth set, completely not in Tolkien and totally fabricated by Jackson, a touch of fantasy beyond the fantasy.

Where I caught it – at not the most high tech of theatres – the 3D for this did not seem all that fabulous, but maybe it was better elsewhere. After the titles, which were beautifully 3D-ified it seemed to go downhill.

– BADMan