Review ‘The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies’ From The Editor

There are three big Middle-earth lessons in “The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies,” Peter Jackson’s final film tribute to J.R.R. Tolkien’s literary fable.

Firstly: Dragons, even ones as mighty as that slithery scorcher Smaug (Benedict Cumberbatch), are ever so moan-y and melodramatic when wounded, whether it’s their ego or their scaly underside that’s been dinged.

Secondly: Five armies are too many. Within minutes of the first assault, “The Hobbit” battlefield begins to look like an out-of-control Comic-Con after-party. As orcs, wargs, bats, elves, dwarfs, eagles and Lake-town citizens go at each other, you have to wonder who is doing the math.

Finally: A dwarf king like Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage) knows when to call it a day. A wizard as wise as Gandalf the Grey (Ian McKellen) understands when to make an exit. Hobbits, however, like Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman), and certain, ahem, directors, are very reluctant to say goodbye.

Even if you don’t already know how the fantasy epic “The Hobbit” ends for the scrappy halfling at the center of it all, if you’ve been paying any attention at all over the past few years, you should by now have a pretty good idea of what awaits in director Peter Jackson’s trilogy-ending “The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies.”

Jackson’s latest film isn’t just a continuation of the story based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” prequel. It’s also a continuation of the visual and storytelling style of those cinematic predecessors, 2012’s “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” and last year’s “The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug.” It’s also very much the movie that fans familiar with those films would expect.

Like those earlier films, “Battle of the Five Armies” — opening today (Dec. 16) ahead of the pre-Christmas weekend rush — is nothing short of gorgeous from a visual standpoint, from the sweeping Middle Earth settings to the richly designed costumes to the seamless visual effects. It also exhibits a keen imagination on the part of Jackson, who has proven to be as gifted as anyone in Hollywood when it comes to the art of big-screen world-building.

But it’s also something of a self-indulgent thing, making for an uneven film that often feels bloated. Granted, it’s still the shortest of Jackson’s three “Hobbit” films, but — burdened with the task of wrapping up all the narrative threads Jackson added to flesh out Tolkien’s 310-page novel to trilogy length — it still clocks in at a hefty 2 hours and 24 minutes.

Still, for all of its faults, “Battle of the Five Armies” — much like last year’s “Desolation of Smaug” — marks for a reasonably entertaining foray into the realm of fantasy, and an improvement over Jackson’s initial 2012 entry in the trilogy.

Those familiar with Tolkien’s original novel will probably remember that its full title is “The Hobbit, or There and Back Again.” The first two films in Jackson’s trilogy covered the “there” part of that journey. “The Battle of the Five Armies” covers the “and back again” part.

It starts quickly — and with considerable amounts of dragonfire. At the same time, it offers little remediation for those who might have decided to parachute into the trilogy without having seen the first two films.

When we last left Bilbo Baggins — the story’s titular Hobbit, played wonderfully by the well-cast Martin Freeman — he had already been enlisted, against his better judgment, to join a company of dwarves on a journey to retake their ancestral home from the fearsome, fire-breathing dragon Smaug (voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch and one of the highlights of the film’s brand of computer-animated wizardry).

That unexpected journey saw Bilbo and company — along with the wizard Gandalf — traversing all of Middle Earth, and braving its many perils, to arrive at the Kingdom Under the Mountain. Once the proud, treasure-laden fortress home of the dwarves’ ancestors, it had been taken over by the murderous Smaug.

In the cliffhanger ending of last year’s “Desolation of Smaug,” the company of dwarves had just awakened the dragon. What’s more, they enraged him with their attempts to roust him from the mountain. That sent him off to the nearby human settlement of Laketown to flex his dragony muscle and exact a measure of revenge.

And that’s where “Battle of the Five Armies” picks up, as Bilbo and company watch from their mountain perch while Laketown bears the fiery wrath of Smaug.

That said, “Five Armies” takes far too long — nearly two and a half hours — to tell a meager story that can be summed up as “Smaug! Petty negotiations! War!”

“Five Armies” is at its best when focuses on Oakenshield, who is undeniably the most interesting character of the film. Armitage excellently fleshes out Oakenshield, who descends into crippling paranoia, while obsessively searching for a jewel that crown him a king. Armitage deftly blends Oakenshield’s increasing distrust along with glimpses of camaraderie and honor. He is a good man at heart driven mad by paranoia and power, surrounded by literal armies threatening to take away what he fought so long and hard to acquire.

Any time the film pulls farther away from Oakenshield’s kingdom under seige, the film becomes less interesting. There’s a forced b-plot involving Sauron — the main antagonist from the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy — that goes no where, except to give some fleeting and pointless fan service to the hardcore Tolkien fan base. Any screen time involving “LotR” alum Legolas (Orlando Bloom) and a fellow female elf (Evangeline Lilly) falls into one of two buckets: useless or just an excuse for CGI elves to fight CGI orcs in completely silly CGI throwdowns. And basically everything involving Gandalf is just a forced prequel to Sauron’s return to power.

A significant chunk of the third act is a massive CGI cartoon where hordes of faceless elves/dwarves/humans/orcs run at each other and swing weapons wildly. This same trick was impressive in 2003 (“Return of the King”) due to its then-unprecedented scale and detail — but now, these detached scrums just feel like a tired exercise in cartoon-on-cartoon character violence en masse. One particular overly CGI’d sequence – obviously designed to impress audiences – received audible laughs at the ludicrous audacity of watching an elf run up falling stones as if they were stairs. This film will date poorly due to its over reliance on silly CGI sequences.

“Five Armies” is, without a doubt, the most enjoyable “Hobbit” film in the series … but that’s more of a complisult to this plodding trilogy than a compliment to the mediocrity of this particular movie. And it’s still not one-tenth as good any movie in the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy.

Overall, at least “Battle of the Five Armies” puts a definitive period at the end of this long and winding run-on sentence. It gets a passing grade simply for not being as insufferably silly as the previous “Hobbit” movies, no dwarf singing breaks, for being (at times) mildly exciting and for finally putting a nail in the coffin of this Middle Earth trilogy.

“The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies” opens in theaters nationwide Dec. 17 and is rated PG-13 for extended sequences of intense fantasy action violence, and frightening images.