A decent finale

Rating: 6/10 (21 December 2014)

This film is basically one giant battle, and so Peter Jackson is in his favorite medium, as he was in the grand battles of "The Two Towers," and "The Return of the King." The Hobbit films have pretty much lost the innocent charm of the book, which is on a much smaller scale than LOTR, but they work OK as a view into the bigger events surrounding Bilbo's quest. As in the previous two installments, the film, although acknowledging Bilbo's feats, minimizes them in favor of more background information hardly mentioned in the books (or not at all, but generally plausible).
It's only an OK "6" because the battles and mano-a-mano duels do not tread new ground, the romance falls flat, and because of the many unnecessary CGI indulgences. I think even an audience brought up with video game physics will have to smirk (as many sitting next to me did) when Legolas steps upward on cobblestones in free fall, violating Newton's third law. The slow motion accentuates the poor physics, and indeed, slow-mo fails in many different places in this movie.
Tolkien's book just did not have women in it, and the politically correct addition of an elf-dwarf romance fails on many levels: a dwarf had to be turned into a mini-human (with care taken not to show elf and dwarf in ways that allows a height comparison); the freely invented characters are not strong enough to make it work; it is simply corny - again, the audience smirked at the longing gazes and flowing tears.
All that said, it's still a good bang for the buck: Cumberbatch's Smaug is suitably ravenous and destructive, the chief of the town gets his due punishment, his opportunistic second hand escapes in drag so that not EVERY evil character gets killed (although probably he'll get offed in the extended edition), Thorin is besotted by the treasure but redeems himself. Some of the invented/misplaced characters work just fine (like the Orc chief and his lieutenant). The battles are great, and heads fly galore.
I bought all the LOTR films, seeing them many times and enjoying them as much as I had enjoyed Tolkien's books before. Seeing the Hobbit installments once at the movie theatre was enough. They simply have too much boring baggage added to them to be really great. Jackson should have stayed a little truer to the books by keeping to his original intent of a two-part Hobbit movie. I hope a fan cuts these three behemoths down to about 6 hours, then we'll have a taut, entertaining road trip mini-series. Or someone is just going to have to remake the Hobbit sooner than would otherwise have been necessary.