The Battle of the Most Random and Unrealistic Moments

Rating: 3/10 (26 December 2014)

I've spent many words on my reviews of the first two Hobbit movies, but I will keep it short for this one, since 'The Battle of the Five Armies' hardly deserves to be called a movie, even performing worse than his two predecessors.
The awful mistake of cutting the book in three movies is most painfully apparent in this final chapter: there is no proper beginning (the lack of the traditional prologue being symptomatic), middle or ending, just a mess of random moments lumped together, without any sense of tension, logic, emotion or narrative flow. All effort has been put in creating pointless and extremely unrealistic action sequences instead of developing a transparent and moving story line. Also, while AUJ (Riddles in the Dark) and DOS (Bilbo meeting Smaug) at least had one great scene, such a (single) highlight was disappointingly missing in BOFTA; instead, we got Alfrid receiving an inexplicably large amount of screen time to act annoyingly over-the-top (failing miserably to add the intended comic relief). To make things even worse, everything after the battle is extremely rushed: we can only guess what happened with Bard, Tauriel, the treasure, the different armies, etc., whereas 'The Return of the King' rightly took its time for proper closures.
I guess there was room for two good movies or maybe even one; now, there is actually no getting around that Jackson single-handedly created a parody of his own, infinitely superior LOTR trilogy.