An abject disaster. An unmitigated mess of a movie.

Rating: 3/10 (3 January 2013)

It's hard to know where to begin when reviewing this 3 hour Peter Jackson disaster. You could start with the High Frame Rate production, which gives everything an unreal/hyper-real quality which is distracting to the point of farce.
Or you could go with the fact that they are not actually telling the story of The Hobbit. They are telling the story of the compendium of Middle Earth, which is 12 books long and only 17 nerds have read in their mothers' basements.
But I think I'll focus on the first moment when I knew the movie had gone off the rails. The meal that constitutes the first meeting between Bilbo and the dwarfs. In the book it is a whimsical way of introducing Bilbo and the dwarfs and highlighting their differences. It is about 12 pages and then they move on.
In the movie it takes something like 45 minutes to get thru the whole meal. The two songs from the scene are a few paragraphs in the book but take like 10 minutes in the movie (Yes, they sang both songs). Add in the prologue about Smaug and the Dwarf King, and the movie is already 1 hour old before the company leaves the Shire. It's basically the whole movie in a nutshell. A long slogging, meandering attempt at an epic that just ends up being a swamp of CGI and overacting.
This movie highlights what it takes to make a book into a good movie. You have to know which parts to keep, which parts to eliminate, and which parts to combine in order to tell the story properly. Jackson does none of this. He takes the cowards way out and keeps everything, and tosses in some bits that aren't even in the book. The result is horrendous.
There are a few bright spots. Martin Freeman does as well as anyone could with the mess he was handed. The riddle showdown with Gollum was compelling and well done. It was the only instance where Jackson made good choices. Deciding which riddles to keep, which to get rid of and shooting the scene in a lively expeditious manner.
But that scene occurs 2 AND A HALF HOURS into the movie. Not worth it, I'm afraid.