Somehow Bland, Despite the Ninety-Minute Fight Scene, Middle Earth's Farewell is Missing a Heart and a Purpose

Rating: 4/10 (19 January 2015)

Peter Jackson finishes with Middle Earth, again, six films and well over a thousand minutes of screen time after he began. It should go without saying that Bilbo's last fight is over-extended, indulgent and often very slow - at this point, those have become LOTR calling cards - but even amidst such expectations, this is a pretty big stretch. There's just so little real substance here, especially after the ferocious dragon Smaug is dismissed very early in the first act, that it feels like we're watching a medieval war reenactment and not a polished bit of Hollywood storytelling. The cast gets plenty of linguistic work, with lots of tongue-twisting names and locations to murmur in a foreboding tone, and the screen dances with all manner of wild paperback-cover visuals, but it deeply hurts that there's so little plot. Even the battle scenes, large and loud as they are, suffer from a bad case of the Rambos. That was a problem I could generally overlook in The Two Towers, even when Legolas was single-handedly taking down herds of war elephants, but now by comparison that seems almost quaint. It doesn't matter how outnumbered our heroes may be, if they're involved in a fight you'd better believe a couple hundred baddies are about to lose their heads. Believability is already a tall ask here, and those fight scenes scrap any shred of disbelief that may have remained somewhat suspended. It's a pantomime, a hopeless exaggeration that rambles on without point or purpose like a drunken Granddad after Thanksgiving dinner. There really, really didn't need to be three of these.