Ca-Ching, this one appears to be done solely for the money

Rating: 4/10 (17 December 2012)

Although I enjoyed the Lord of the Ring trilogy, I found this film to be very poor in terms of visualizations, costuming, plot, and character development. The film can't make up it's mind if it wants to be serious or slapstick. As a result it's a muddle of fantastically silly contrived action scenes, poorly made up Dwarfs (apparently proper make up was not important to the budget), and lifeless script that didn't even try to make the adventure interesting. What is really disappointing is that this film had an opportunity to excel, but Jackson did not attempt it. I get the impression that this part of the story was not interesting to him so he just tried to get past it in the hopes that the second film will make up for this close to crummy effort. This is not a film I would want to see again. I can't say the film was a complete stinker, but it was not what I expected in terms of professionalism. The good thing about this film it will surely make the second film appear better.