Peter Jackson's Jar-Jar-Binks disaster.

Rating: 4/10 (29 December 2014)

I'm not a fanatical fan of either the books or the Middle Earth universe in general, but I've read the LoTR trilogy and the Hobbit, and I've enjoyed Jackson's adaptations in all the five film so far. That sadly ended with "Battle of the Five Armies".
It's hard to pinpoint exactly what's gone wrong in BoTFA, as there are just so many different areas where it falls short of what we've come to expect from the series. There's been plenty of reviews here on direction, pacing, writing, etc, so I'll focus on two points where I the film really broke for me. The absolute worst was how the film shoves comic relief in your face throughout, to a degree where it actually feels like the serious scenes are "serious relief" in a comedy. A badly written and not really all that funny comedy that is.
To that end, Alfrid Lickspittle is Jackson's Jar-Jar Binks. I get it, he's an unsympathetic character. I realized that the first time we saw him in Desolation, but somehow Jackson figured we needed 12-15 more scenes with the guy, really driving home that point, all of them attempting at humor and all of them failing miserably.
Then there's the 45 minute long battle scene, with the now obligatory god-ninja-elves defeating hundreds of orcs without breaking a sweat. It's gotten so bad that it's really hard to be scared of the orcs anymore, and it's indicative of a major problem in the movie.
Orcs have become such obvious cannon-fodder, that their armies never really feel like a threat, or even a force to be reckoned with. Don't get me wrong, Azog is pretty bad-ass, and so is his second in command, but the rest of the orcs seem to die if anyone just looks at them sternly. At one point there's a young boy with no battle training, looks to be no more than 12 years old, taking out two heavily armored Uruk Hai sized orcs in five seconds, with a couple of swings of a sword.
Between the god-like ninja-elves and the trying-to-be-hilarious-but-also-god-like dwarven fighters, the orc armies are just a minor nuisance, that are ultimately dispersed and killed by a few of the ever present eagles that seem to show up every time someone needs to have their day saved.
I couldn't enjoy the narrative, because it was broken, riddled with bad humor and full of plot holes. I couldn't enjoy the character development because there wasn't one, and it was very difficult to enjoy the combat scenes, because of these weakling orcs.
In the end, I have to give it 4 stars for Bilbo's acting and for Christopher Lee kicking ass at Dol Guldur.