An enjoyable film, if you aren't a devoted Tolkien fan..

Rating: 7/10 (20 December 2014)

As a person who preferred the action-packed Two Towers and Return of the King to the quieter Fellowship of the Ring, I had high expectations for BOFA. I was never the hobbits and dwarfs kind of girl, so I was excited about the editions of Legolas and the White Council. However, I was always against the addition of Tauriel, especially the love triangle, and o boy was I right as she killed the movie. I think the reason why the Hobbit movies fail to captivate the critics as much as the LOTR movies did, is due to the lack of character development. The LOTR movies had an even bigger cast than the Hobbit movies, but the audience was able to empathize with every character (even the antagonist Gollum). In the Hobbit movies, PJ just throws random 'emotional moments' everywhere, like the whole Mommy issues Legolas suddenly has at the end of the movie....He never makes us care about a character (with the exception of Bard and Bilbo). Some characters just show up as a cameo almost (Beorn)..
The movie is enjoyable to watch, if you haven't read the book or a huge LOTR fan. Sigh.. I watched the Fellowship of the Ring right after coming home from the theatres.. big mistake as it just made me compare BOFA to the high- quality story telling of the LOTR movies. I watched it with my friend who was watching it for the first time and he remarked that it looks like a movie that came out in 2014 and not in 2001.
*Spolier*
Now onto the battle itself: PJ tried to match the epic battles of LOTR with the addition of a lot of weird orcs/monsters... That show up for like 2 seconds each. In LOTR, the heroes were shown at least struggling to kill the orcs (even the great fighter Aragorn took more than one strike to kill orcs). The Dwarfs that make up Thorin's company aren't skilled warriors like Boromir and Aragorn, (some of them never even used a weapon) however they kill orcs much more easily. Legolas and Tauriel are just plain ridiculous. Legolas should be able to fight a whole army of orcs without getting a single scratch.
The death of Fili wasn't tragic because he said like 3 lines in the whole trilogy. The death of Kili was forcibly made sad by the whole love thing with Tauriel, but even his death wasn't all that sad. Thorin's death was just plain stupid.