Mostly effective and enjoyable but with some large flaws.

Rating: 6/10 (16 December 2012)

Some of the reviews by professional critics have called The Hobbit overblown and bloated. YES it is long. Yes, perhaps cutting 30 minutes of extraneous material (saving more for a future possible extended edition) would have made a better film; but to me The Hobbit was a reasonably absorbing and gently humorous movie which occasionally becomes breath-taking. I saw this in 2D, so I've no idea what the HFR version is like.
Jackson still manages to bring some deep feeling to the material - usually when he has Gandalf (Ian McKellen, splendid as ever) utter some words of wisdom, but this is a lighter shade of Middle-Earth compared to the original Lord Of The Rings movies, just occasionally veering towards darkness. It's perhaps a little unfortunate that the appendices material - the stuff not in the original book - is sledgehammered into the narrative, often slowing the action down. There's little doubt that occasionally the movie crawls.
PJ has sort of reversed his approach here from Lord Of The Rings; there he had to cut huge wedges of the books out of the trilogy to keep the running time down;here he has to expand the story and beat it to death to get to the 169 minute running time.
Martin Freeman is a superb Bilbo Baggins, but I also found Richard Armitidge's Thorin, James Nesbitt's Bofur and Ken Stott's Balin made good contributions to the movie - the rest of the dwarfs hardly registered with me. The returning Rings characters, Elrond, Frodo, Galadriel and Saruman feel like a bit of window dressing to be honest; but who's complaining when Kate Blanchett looks as utterly gorgeous as she does in this movie! Prepare for Jackson's trademark swooping camera, Middle-Earth vistas a plenty, a nicely judged turn from Sylvester McCoy as Radagast the Brown, whose character nonetheless feels somewhat out of place, and a moment of darkness as the Necromancer shows up. Smaug is used as a teaser for the upcoming films.
Perhaps the film's best moments come when Bilbo finally meets Gollum, in what I think will prove to be a classic scene. Tolkien's text is here rendered extremely faithfully. The only sequence that didn't really work for me was the battling rock giants. What the hell was that all about? A short sentence from the book is turned into a jarring sequence that also seems out of place. However this was an OK start to the new trilogy; it did not improve.