"There's only a hundred of them." - says Thorin to Dwalin as the two of them face an army.

Rating: 7/10 (2 January 2015)

Is Jackson parodying his own fight scenes or what?
But anyway, The Battle Of The Five Armies is a film that mostly just suffers from being 2 hours of battle and half an hour of actual character scenes.
There's a very incompetent feel about the Hobbit as a whole. An Unexpected Journey had too much plot, The Desolation Of Smaug had plot, but that was bizarrely cut out for more fight scenes and the cheesy subplot and this one goes even further by being one huge battle with little plot pellets in-between.
To give Jackson credit, the movie still managed to entertain me a lot and there was much to love, like Alfrid, Thorin's development, Bilbo and Galadriel's standoff with Sauron. But those moments are few and in- between.
How come there's so much time and yet the film accomplishes so little? Why is the ending so rushed(though it is a wonderful ending)?
If I'd been Jackson, I would've padded out the second movie(so that people would want to see the third one) by lengthening the Mirkwood section. Remember the magical river, black squirrels, the starvation of the dwarfs and Bilbo's taking command? Had they turned the forest into a real threat, it could've easily filled out a large portion of the movie, plus the Dol Guldur subplot and maybe an early introduction for Bard on his own?
Have the movie end with them seeing the mountain, like the first one.
But no, all the padding is here. It is good padding, though as we see Thorin really well developed(though everyone else is just kinda there - like Radagast and Beorn and the rest of the Company) and the focus on the people of Laketown works great. Bard is also a charismatic character and then there's the wonderful Alfrid.
Whatever happened to the Master though? I kept expecting him to reappear as he was in the trailers. He would've made a great comparison to Thorin like he did in the books(he supposedly fled with a load of Erebor gold and died alone).
The highlight of the film for me was the Galadriel scene. Psychedelic(almost like a horror film) and scary as hell. She reminded me of the girl from The Ring in those scenes.
Overall, the film is extremely padded, but it's the good kind of padding.