The Hobbit: The Battle of The Five Armies // Review

“It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were. And sometimes you didn’t want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened?”

And so we come to the end at last, having been goaded into handing over silly money once again by Richard Armitage pleading “One last time!!” with sad, hopeless eyes. Where to start with The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies? Rather than Peter Jackson saying farewell to Middle Earth (for now) with a triumphant celebration of all things Tolkien, we’ve been left with the most feeble of whimpers. Worse than whimpering, mockery. The Battle of The Five Armies is so bad it’s almost a parody of action films, filled with hilariously implausible stunts, jaw-droppingly clunky dialogue, and so many ‘GOTCHA!’ moments that you have wonder whether it was intentional. Alongside this you can throw in utterly pointless sub-plots, murky, sweat-drenched visuals, a travesty of CGI and some extremely confused editing. I could rant for days about all the ways this most recent Hobbit experience trips over itself; and I will.

Time To Re-Align Expectations on this Journey? The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey Review

The Empire Strikes Back was panned upon release for being the quintessential ‘middle’ film; it had no beginning, no end and didn’t really go anywhere. Today it’s regarded, rightly, as the finest of the series. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey suffers from the same affliction. Except it’s the first in a trilogy, has a seemingly endless beginning and will most certainly not come to be as highly regarded.

Perhaps it’s wrong of me to say it doesn’t really go anywhere though. The Lonely Mountain bound band of 13 Dwarves, one Hobbit and one very familiar wizard most certainly do go places. There’s plenty of the sweeping landscape shots of Peter Jackson’s New Zealand that came to define The Lord of the Rings and there’s an abundance of walking. Unfortunately they don’t actually progress very far.