Disappointing

Rating: 4/10 (18 December 2012)

I really wanted to like this film but it was absolutely dreadful. The HFR issue is a complete red herring; it's just a really bad film.
The dwarfs were just 12 Jar Jar Binks equivalents, plus a poor man's Aragorn Gandalf was erratic rather than wise and just magicked away everything on his whim, showing up whenever he felt like it. The butterfly scene in Fellowship was excellent, using it again here is just a feeble get of of jail card.
So many gimmicks, I can understand wanting to add a bit of light heartedness to a stony franchise but it took the biscuit. Every single action or battle scene revolved around some slapstick element that made you cringe or just laugh at its pitifulness.
No pace, no real driving force behind Gandalf or Bilbo's characters. Freeman's Bilbo has one good scene in the whole movie. Apart from that he spends the film making The Office-style straight man faces, changing his mind about the quest every ten minutes with no real explanation or context.
The LOTR trilogy was good as it didn't rely on the source material at all, they were excellent stand alone films. With The Hobbit, the Tolkein fanboys are frantically turning through the browning pages of the novels to try and excuse the bad acting, flat characters and pointless scenes.
A really bad film. Do not bother with it or the next two