The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies
As I've written in my reviews of the other two Hobbit films, whatever Jackson had working for him in The Lord of the Rings, which I found to be thrilling cinema, is not there in The Hobbit. He fundamentally changed the nature of the book, a children's adventure about dwarfs and a dragon, into a brooding, bloated story.
We begin with Smaug, the pissed-off dragon, destroying Lake-Town. Bard (Luke Wilson) manages to kill him, hitting him in the weak spot. If I remember correctly, that's how the book ends, but Jackson is just getting started with a lot of Middle Earth politics. Thorin Oakenshield, the King of the Dwarfs, is now inside the mountain with the treasure the dragon was guarding, and is going mad with greed and paranoia. The elves and humans want their share, and those pesky orcs are on the move, too.
The resulting battle is mostly tedious, full of soulless CGI. I will admit getting interested in some of the showdowns, especially Legolas (Orlando Bloom) against an orc whose name escapes me, and Azog, the chief orc, against Thorin (Richard Armitage). Legolas has always been my favorite character; he just has so much elan. In this film he catches a ride with a giant bat.
And Martin Freeman, as Bilbo Baggins, is a solid heart to the film. His farewell to the dwarfs is touching, and his courage and honesty are heartwarming. And then there's Ian McKellen as Gandalf, one of the great pairings of actor and character in movie history. I just read that Sean Connery actually turned the role down, saying he didn't understand Tolkien. Our gain.
Now that Jackson is done with Tolkien, I'll be interested to see what he does next, although his other non-Tolkien films since Rings, King Kong and The Lovely Bones, have left a lot to be desired.
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