CGFX/plot diarrhea will leave you empty at the end

Rating: 4/10 (28 December 2013)

Easily a contender for one of the worst blockbusters of the decade, The Desolation of Smaug crushes everything good about the beloved story The Hobbit and bakes in every stale trope of modern action movies. The bitterest part is how obviously this script was drawn out to fill up three films, when it could have been a more intimate work, just as the novel had been.
Too many other elements have been forced into the story, attempting to create conflict where none need exist. The worst of this is the love triangle between Legolas, Kili and a character, Tauriel, who was invented precisely for this purpose, making the movie read more like a soap-opera than an epic fantasy. The barrel ride, for example, was made into some complicated Rube Goldberg plot device to arrive at a romantic climax later in Laketown. For purists, the characterizations are all off, with Bard as a fisherman scorned by the townsfolk, an all-too-prominent Radagast sketched as an addled hobo, and the Laketown mayor far too paranoid about some imaginary revolution on the edge of erupting. The dragon, who was to have been the pièce de résistance, gets mired in an action sequence that takes all the gas out of the character, and the tête à tête between Bilbo and Smaug is devoid of the mischievous streak in our hobbit hero that made the book version so entertaining.
The movie had a weird light to it, and left me wondering if I was watching some PBS video drama from the 70s or 80s. Most of the movie lacked the natural light that made the Lord of the Rings so breathtaking in its sweep. In that series, the beauty of New Zealand really shone through, but this series has an artificial quality to it, reminiscent of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. The action sequences were cartoonish and over-the-top, suspending the laws of physics in a brazen manner, creating an almost campy tone. Directorially, the actors seemed to be struggling with dialogue that felt out of place in the story (though that could just be my bias for the original).
This movie seemed to have all the elements of a success: a well-established franchise, the founding director, an ensemble of great actors and stunning VFX technology, but the script was far too crowded and the action too muddy to entertain. I want to say the producers filled the movie to overflowing as an apology for poor script choice, but then I remind myself that the overflowing was the problem in the first place.