For children

Rating: 4/10 (15 December 2013)

I loved LOTR trilogy. For sure there were childish moments which were partly detrimental to the movie in LOTR too. Don't get me wrong: both LOTR and TH were written for young and curious people but it's a thin line the one separating fun and silliness. LOTR had few moments of silliness but was also able to deliver drama, tragedy, awe, tension, greatness and beauty. The first Hobbit instead had too much silliness, too much children stuff, no drama, no tension and it was nearly painful to watch just like those films you're ashamed to be watching due to the high expectations you had. This second film is just slightly better simply because the stupid dialogues are less and the action is everywhere: you can hardly spend some seconds thinking about what you're watching before the next cascade of fights, arrows, jumps and on and on. Sure the film is exceptional from the graphic perspective but this planetary success should be due to the fact that Tolkien's books are great stories: and here again - as in the first episode - the story is a complete, uninteresting, boring, childish, mess. So great visuals are not enough at all. The few relevant lines pronounced by characters are usually stupid and unable to create any tension or sense of emergency. Out of combat characters seems to be standing on the stage of a ghetto theater or in a serial studio caring for the camera angle. Only Ian McKellan is able to deliver few emotions and to take you to Middle Earth: the rest of the cast sounds like they're part of a farce no one cares about. The (high) votes here make me think that lots of people appreciated LOTR without even noticing all the precious gems that the production was able to deliver to readers of the book. Whatever: look at the Hobbit, enjoy this bad product with its nice landscapes, CGI, continuous action and go on avoiding books since your brains' capacity of imagination is too low to enjoy books anymore (and appreciate Cinema versions). Which vote should we give to multimilliondollar productions that turn out to be bad cinema? I suggest the lowest possible.