25% Tolkien, 75% Peter Jackson filler

Rating: 4/10 (25 December 2013)

This 2nd Hobbit movie shows the weakness of turning a 300-page children's book into a full blown 8-hour movie trilogy, an expansion which was unarguably done for commercial and not artistic reasons. There's not enough material in the book for a trilogy, so everyone at New Line had to make stuff up to get three movies out of it.
My suggestion is to read the book before (or after) you watch the movie. Consider how extra content added to the film changes the story. In addition to creating mindless action scenes for the sake of entertainment, they reshaped existing characters into heroes and insert new heroes into the story, which was not written to be so grand or epic.
It would be okay if they called this "a film inspired by The Hobbit", but calling this film "The Hobbit" is just wrong.