looks great, story not so...

Rating: 6/10 (18 December 2014)

First off, I'd like to say that I enjoyed the first Hobbit movie. I didn't think it was great, but it was enjoyable. I had problems with the second movie though. Especially the final scene in the mountain kept dragging on. And this is the first thing that bugged me of this third Hobbit movie. The entire Smaug storyline could have been wrapped up at the end of the second movie. The opening scene with Smaug only lasted a few minutes. They could have kept the final scene of the Desolation of Smaug shorter, thereby making it more interesting, and added the demise of Smaug to the second movie and even have time to set up things for this third movie as a cliff hanger of some sorts.
Now, about this third movie. Overall the movie had great visuals. I did have some problems though. In the first scenes with legolas his face looked like it was cgi or something. There was something very off with him. The same goes for the face of Dain. It kind of looked like bad console game cgi. Other than that, I really enjoyed the look of the movie. The landscapes were beautiful. The details in the armours looked great.
The story was lacking though. It really shows that the source material wasn't enough for 3 movies. The story could have been told in a better way in just 2 movies. I also had a problem with how the writers tried to connect this story with the Lord of the Rings, by mentioning the Strider to Legolas...That's just bad writing.
I also found that the movie was lacking in suspense. The battles looked great, but there wasn't really any feel of suspense in them.
I'm not sure if I would recommend this movie to anyone. It wasn't bad, but there are better ways to spend your time...