Entertaining, but it ain't no Lord

Rating: 6/10 (25 December 2014)

We all love middle earth, we all love Lord Of The Rings, and most of us love Martin Freeman. What could possibly go wrong with the Hobbit then? A lot is the answer to that. I personally enjoyed the first 2 installments of the hobbit, but the fact that there was 3 movies made from a short book as it is worried me from the start. 'The Battle of Five Armies' (I only counted 4 by the way) was great popcorn cinema entertainment. But as a film it wasn't much. 2 and a half hours of CGI filled orcs, dwarfs and some odd worm things which did nothing. Where was the hobbit in all this. Not doing much really apart from making inspirational speeches about friendship and getting in the way. In this film it was all about Thorin (Armitage, who plays the part well) and his mind going mad with greed after claiming back his homeland. It all seemed very rushed and lazy from a normally excellent Peter Jackson. The dragon scene lasts no more than 20 minutes when he is the main focus for the previous 2 films, they made up an Elf female just for a love interest which was not needed and just felt weird and then they had a barely recognisable Billy Connelly just making jokes in the middle of a very serious battle scene... You get the feeling his heart wasn't really in these films from the start. I get it was a much lighter story than Lord Of The Rings but the constant try hard gags weren't needed, they were much more subtle and worked better in Lord. I enjoyed it, but I won't be watching again and I had to go home and immediately watch all of the LOTR trilogy just to make sure Middle Earth hadn't completely lost me. Lord Of The Rings: The return of the king won 11 Oscars (obviously, it was excellent). This will not get near it. It doesn't feel like it was made by the same people.