An Underwhelming Journey

Rating: 4/10 (25 October 2016)

The Hobbit Trilogy ends here, with The Battle of the Five Armies. And really, it's the battle of the audience's patience for a satisfying conclusion. The Five Armies (I'm going to call it) is the obligatory conclusion to one of the most overstretched film trilogies in recent memory. The battle itself feels like it never ends, and it's an absolute bore to realize that there is VERY little plot outside the title fight.
The Five Armies is one of the most self-indulgent films to cost $200 million+ and the story is basically dried up leftovers from the last two Hobbit films. You...just...want it...to end. Okay, Smaug is dead, now Thorin is corrupted by his family's gold, and now... The Five Armies are battling it out. Aaaaaaaand... the fight itself feels so tedious in that it's one of the most unnecessarily elongated fights ever. It's not something that just happens; you get stuck in it for longer than you were expecting. There's almost a complete lack of 'beats' here, and for those that ARE present basically are there to say this: 'The Lord of the Rings is going to happen! Remember that!' What a letdown. It gets so tedious that when the dwarfs start dying you don't care like you would if the story was progressing at a timely pace.
Peter Jackson should have trimmed this WHOLE thing into the conclusion of The Desolation of Smaug instead of stretching ten-thirty minutes worth of content into a two hour plus movie. Big mistake. Peter Jackson may or may not have had the final say in turning The Hobbit films into a trilogy, but this film definitely got the short end of the stick in that department. It's a shame because the films ALL deserved better treatment overall.
I don't recommend this film; it's a criminal bore to watch. JRR Tolkien would have disowned this if he were still alive.