It’s almost beside the point if I post my opinion of The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies since, if you’ve seen parts 1 and 2, you’ll just have to go see part 3. If you didn’t, you won’t.
Part 3 of this series of movies (based on a 300 page book) is a seriously long slog of a movie (and it’s even the shortest of the three movies). I grew quite bored of the movie during the endless action scenes that were all just padding and needed to be cut back to make a leaner, meaner, more exciting action flick.
The problem is twofold… primarily it’s because this movie feels thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread. There’s not enough story… but the other reason is the problem with the actual book. As any reader of the book knows, the resolution to the dragon situation comes earlier than expected (though at least less arbitrary and random in the film) leaving the titular Battle of the Five Armies… at which point you begin to ask yourself what this whole story is actually about. Is it a quest to slay a dragon and get some loot or is it a battle over real estate? This is survivable in the book since at least this sequence takes up maybe 20 or 30 pages but the movie stretches it out to two hours. Two hours of massive padding.
I’m not sure what else there is to say… some of the humor is out of place, the resolution to some character conflicts just kind of happened as though to serve the plot, the tie-ins to the original trilogy was pushed off the screen abruptly, there are some decent (but not great) emotional points, it looks great, some of the combat stuff is creative if overdone, and… other points of note. Whatever.
The other two movies were full of massive padding too but at least they had that advantage of a story that went from set piece to set piece… you had story or at least location advancement. This movie is all set in the same place so you don’t even get new environments or new characters. I think that’s my ultimate problem… whereas part 2 (for example) had these long action scenes, they had variety… a crazy barrel in the river ride, fights with giant spiders in a forest, fights with a dragon in an underground city, etc.
It sounds like I hated the movie… I guess I didn’t. It’s not a bad movie, just overlong, stretched, and, yeah, it drags and gets a little boring maybe at the 2 hr mark. Did I mention this movie is long? I might not have made that point.
I’d be very curious to see a fan edit of these three movies that cuts it down to a reasonable 3 hours or something.
Score: 77