Swords and Sauce-ry: Not the Sharpest Knives in the Drawer

Rating: 3/10 (2 January 2014)

The visuals and technical imagery are brilliant, the action/chasing well-paced, the dragon quite stunning, but on every other aspect of storytelling -- plot, narrative, dialogue, character-development – this movie is so poor.
I don't understand why a reasonably well-told and rather charming story (albeit, literature-wise, a bit slight) should be denuded of all its wit, charm and intelligence, and actual tension, and be converted to this corpse-strewn romp through Middle Earth, in such a dumb, stolid, uninspired and fundamentally sloppy fashion.
There are four aspects which had me shaking my head in despair.
One -- the bits that were in the book. These are glossed over, mostly to get to bits that weren't in the book. The encounter with Beorn is turned into a scene of somewhat arbitrary rationale (first he is chasing the dwarfs, who hide from him inside his own house; then he is protecting them because they are slightly higher up the hate-scale than their pursuers); the eerie, mysterious Mirkwood turns into a follow-the-yellow-brick-road stroll, except the dwarfs are too incompetent even for that (see Three), and the supposedly tense stand-off between Dildo and Smaug is resolved in moments -- cue Thorin's dramatic entrance armed only with the sword he came in (yeah mate, the dragon that has slaughtered armies in their thousands is bound to shiver with fright when you show up with your massive tool).
This means we get more action, fighting then chasing, or chasing then fighting, or just fighting, where "fight" in this context means wholsesale slaughter of sword-fodder orcs. The good guys are, naturally, barely scathed; except for a slight leg-wound contrived for a might-as-well-have-had-subtitles sub-plot development (see Two) and Legolam getting a slight nose bleed, mostly because he forgets his qualities as an archer and fights the Big Baddie with a knife, rather than just shooting him. (Must have been out of range, or shame stayed his hand. It's a shame I've run out arrows, thought Legolam, and a shame the director hasn't chosen to share that with the movie-goers. Or think it through.)
Two -- the bits that weren't in the book. Strong female characters weren't, admittedly, a mainstay of the original story; those 1930s Cambridge Dons weren't renowned for their awareness of body parts below the neck, and only dimly aware of "chaps in skirts". So, to get over the homo-erotic twelve dwarfs being all boys together, we throw in a hot chick she-elf and give her a hugely improbable instant crush on a dwarf -- the only non-caricatured, completely in proportion, darkly good looking one of course. At least it raised the admittedly dim prospect of some seriously dirty dwarf-on-elf action (if only for a potentially redeeming scene with Kili pitilessly humping Tauriel from behind and shouting "Like the pointy ears, elf -- gives me something to ... hang on to!").
Three -- the dwarfs are useless. Utterly, utterly useless. A more useless combination of 12 characters could only be generated by taking Ian Duncan Smith, Jeremy Cutter-Hunt and Michael Gove, and then cloning Gove 9 nine times. So far they have managed to get themselves trapped by 3 cave trolls, a bunch of goblins, some spiders, the wood elves and finally the loser humans so smart they live next to a dragon and immediately believe in the trickle-down economics rousingly proposed by Thorin. (Then again so many people have been swallowing that neo-liberal guff for the last 30 years this is wretchedly plausible...)
However useless the dwarfs are (bearing in mind they've shared the minor details of their quest with everyone in Laketown, and still set off in search of a secret tunnel in order to take that dragon by surprise), those trying to catch them are even worse. So Azog the (supposedly) scary Orc repeatedly fails to catch the dwarfs where everyone or everything else succeeds. It is little wonder his armies get turned into chutney in LotR since he demonstrates an ineptitude on a scale so vast it that makes Douglas Haig look like a strategic mastermind. In fact he is only out-classed in stupidity by two characters, the first being Smaug himself, who is so stunningly useless he is outwitted by the dwarfs (for whom we have already established a stratospheric standard for incompetence) using a tactic that would embarrass a kindergarten. The second character being...
Four -- Goodgulf, or Gandulf to use his stage name, is overwhelmingly useless. Not "Gandulf the Grey", more "Gandulf, the Fairly Shaite Wizard". If he is not abandoning the dwarfs to their collective fates, he is playing chicken. In the first movie, confronted by Azog, instead of invoking some mighty incantation, he runs up a tree and sets fire to fir cones (D&D's Magic Missile is actually Fiery Fir-cone, who knew?) with the added distinction that evidently self-preservation is not his strongest instinct as he sets alight the very object providing his protection. "I'm Gandulf, Gandulf the Grey. As in: Gandulf, the Rather Short on Grey Cells." Fortunately the bird-brained is saved by some birds for him to survive into this movie, where his contribution to the quest is to hide from the orcs, flee from the bearman, abandon the dwarfs at Mirkwood, and get himself captured in Dol Guldur; only the movie ends before any ornithological deus ex machina can save him. So next movie then...
Incompetence on a Middle Earth scale. Unfortunately this extends to the story telling. I'm all for suspending belief and it being a fantasy and all that, but at least make the internal characterisation, motivation, plot etc consistent. It is so sloppy: my suspension of belief stops at the point where it is impossible to find some halfway decent scriptwriters who can tell a story properly and get all the action, romance, excuse for 3D visuals, etc the director wants into it, yet retain some flavour of the original story and a bit of internal logic.