Far too long, individually and as a trilogy

Rating: 4/10 (28 July 2017)

The Hobbit Trilogy comes in at a massive 462 minutes for the theatrical cut and an even more bloated 532 minutes for the extended version.
That's 9 hours of film for a book that barely hits 300 pages in length!
All three movies suffer from the same problems - superfluous subplots, lack of ruthlessness in the editing room, cartoon battle scenes and chases with no real sense of any threat and sidelining Bilbo as the main protagonist.
The series decreases in quality as the trilogy progresses. The first is mildly enjoyable, the second has it's moments and the third is just an unwatchable incoherent mess.
I would highly recommend searching out 'The Tolkien Edit' where a fan has compressed all this material into a much tighter, tense and enjoyable 260 minutes. This version is far more faithful to the source material and removes almost all the issues with the trilogy mentioned above. I came across this fan version 3 yrs after the theatrical release of the forgettable final movie and it renewed by appreciation of Jackson's Middle Earth.
If only Peter Jackson had shown some restraint this could have been an excellent couple of movies!