Jackson delivers industrial quantities of Hobbit

Rating: 7/10 (15 December 2014)

After Smaug the dragon goes mental, assorted groups of orcs, elves, men, dwarfs and a hobbit battle endlessly with each other for reasons which are far from obvious.
With the shortest film in the set, Peter Jackson's lengthy love affair with Middle earth draws to a close, so how do I feel about it? I feel pretty much as I did about The Hobbit parts 1 and 2, actually: whereas The Lord Of The Rings married epic with intimate in both the books and, fittingly, the film adaptations, the relatively small story of The Hobbit, feels bloated by the gargantuan epic Jackson has made of it. I enjoyed it, but I looked at my watch, often, during the extensive battle sequences which fill the bulk of the latter part of this movie. As Jackson's King Kong demonstrated, he isn't always able to tell that More does not necessarily equal Better. This trilogy has been crafted with care and skill and with a complete inability to apply the editor's red pencil when necessary. The story, such as it is, takes a remote second place to the eye candy on offer.
Which is not to say that it doesn't have its moments - it does. The opening sequence of Smaug exacting revenge is quite wonderful, there are highlights among the action, the individual performances from Freeman, McKellen, Pace and some of the others are excellent, and the closing sequence in the Shire is quite good fun, especially the reappearance of familiar LotR music cues.
But against that, we have CGI which is sometimes shockingly unconvincing (Smaug is magnificent, whereas the ballista trolls and Thranduil's elk and Billy Connolly's mount, for instance, aren't), a mixed-race romance which seems entirely out of place, an orc villain who doesn't seem important enough for the emphasis he is given, a batch of featured dwarfs who continue to be indistinguishable and unmemorable (apart from the Irish one, the Scottish one and the handsome one) and, worst of all, an omnipresent and hideously unfunny "comic relief" slimebag who never gets the comeuppance he has been asking for throughout the movie.
I also fear that future generations, watching these three overblown films as a lead in to Lord Of The Rings, simply won't bother with the (chronologically) second, and far superior, trilogy.
I quite enjoyed it, and I shall no doubt watch it again, more than once, but I shall do so without the passion with which I still watch the LotR films because, if I am honest, these films have been something of a disappointment.