More is not better; more is just more

Rating: 5/10 (16 February 2015)

I know Tolkien fans who enjoy the Hobbit trilogy and admit: "Yes, the movies are too long... but the more Middle-earth, the better". I believe this is wrong in a fundamental way. Sometimes there is too much of a good story; in fact, I'd argue many stories are good BECAUSE there isn't too much of them. They knew when to start and when to finish. Take two of the highest-rated movies on IMDb, The Good, The Bad and The Ugly and The Shawshank Redemption (SPOILERS for them if you have been living under a rock). Would the former be better with a flashback to Tuco's miserable childhood? Would the latter be improved by a ten-minutes epilogue with Andy and Red drinking Piña Colada on the beach? I doubt it.
There is a tendency of modern blockbusters to add bloat, in the form of irrelevant subplots and characters sprouting on every scene; this is mistaken for depth. But complex and complicated are not the same thing (L.A. Confidential=complex; Revenge of the Sith=complicated). It becomes conspicuous when Jackson adapts this slim children book in three movies with a total running time of nearly eight hours - about 474 minutes (theatrical cuts) for 300 pages, little more than half a page per minute; by comparison, The Lord of the Rings adaptation was about two pages per minute.
(For the record, I don't think making a trilogy was necessarily a blunder; the mistake was making each entry so insufferably long. You could cut at least 30-40 minutes from every Hobbit movie with no discernible loss in terms of plot and characterization).
Irony burns when a coming-of-age story/cautionary tale about war and avarice becomes the devolution of a great storyteller delivering action set-pieces porn in a greed-fueled project.
So, bloat. The other great sin is tone, which is all over the place. Jackson could have chosen between the ominous atmosphere of The Lord of the Rings and the whimsical one of The Hobbit. Pick one or the other. Here we have juvenile antics (like the embarrassing rendition of Radagast) mixed with lugubrious horror villains.
This jarring discrepancy infects set-pieces: the orgy of action takes place in a consequence-free zone. Characters fall fifty feet and walk away without a bruise; in the execrable Goblin Town escape, the Dwarf company rushes through a million enemies like a lawnmower. It's tedious and unexciting. Compare to the sense of physical threat of the Moria sequence in Fellowship.
A positive note? Acting, with McKellen a welcome return as Gandalf, Freeman excellent as fussy Bilbo, Armitage an effective anti-hero as Thorin.
Not a disaster (here and there, Jackson's former good touch shines through); just a major disappointment.
5,5/10