In “The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies,” director Peter Jackson’s epic vision of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth, which has spanned the past 13 years, has finally come to a conclusion.
This conclusion, sadly, suffers the same fate that previous “Hobbit” films suffered: void of the narrative direction and sense of urgency that were so finely incorporated in “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy.
The film’s opening, for instance, would have served better as an ending for the previous installment. Instead, the scene of Smaug’s demise of Lake Town, which rudely throws viewers directly into the middle of the action, feels tacked on, unbalancing the film from the start.
The chintzy and predictable fingerprints of Hollywood are stamped all over Jackson’s final expedition into Middle Earth.
There are times when the CGI effects that Jackson has recently decided to overuse, replacing practical effects and the magic of makeup and costume, are blatantly noticeable and frankly not very good.
Then there are the multiple instances of narrative cliches, turning moments which could have been very poignant or climactic into real eye-rollers.
And let’s not forget about the romance between an elf and a dwarf, which is not only foreign to the original source material, but feels so obligatory that it is patronizing.
When the film does succeed (and yes it does succeed, despite the aforementioned detractors), it does so when Jackson focuses the narrative on Bilbo and Thorin’s strained friendship and the broken trust that greed and a lust for power can inflict.
The ending is satisfactory, with a perfect segue into “The Fellowship,” but as with the Star Wars saga, save yourself some time by skipping the prequels and jumping right into the meat of Jackson’s work.
In a time where cinema is licking the bottom of the barrel, getting off on reboots and sequels and making a buck, it would have been refreshing to see Jackson take a stand for brevity.
Side stories were interesting but the film and trilogy as a whole, like many of the dwarves, had a lot of fat that could have been trimmed.
