Overlong, childish and full of plot holes

Rating: 4/10 (12 March 2014)

I adore Tolkien, and adored the LOTR movies. I didn't have a problem with the departures from the original - different genre, different person at the helm. I don't have a great problem with Jackson departing from the plot of The Hobbit as such, except that the original in no way justifies three movies.
No, the problem for me is that the content that has been added is just so dire. There's a weight of unmemorable characters and the interaction feels stilted and wooden. There's even an added romance that's gratuitous and flimsy. The plot makes limited sense, and I spent most of the movie saying "Why are they doing that? But surely they knew that already...? Oh, that's just silly."
To add to that, the CGI is pretty unimpressive. At its best - Smaug - it looks like a video game. As its worst, it's ridiculously over- choreographed fight scenes that had me yawning at their predictability - surfing on shields and bouncing on enemies' heads is now compulsory only because we can. This makes for good guys who are able to gallop around dispatching baddie after baddie while never getting a scratch - with one exception, itself neatly sidestepped. This makes for almost zero suspense.
I was never entirely sure who was supposed to enjoy this movie. The scenes in Dol Guldur add some of the darkness of LOTR, and the spiders of Mirkwood are much more threatening, although Bilbo cuts through them like butter. On the other hand there's romance, there's slapstick, there are pointless shield-surfing fights every few minutes, and needless distracting cameos from LOTR franchise characters.
For me, the movie's biggest crime is in its departure, not from the plot of the original, but from its spirit. The Hobbit is a fairy tale, the story of an untraveled young man given a job that takes him on an adventure beyond the confines of a comfortable life, to which he ultimately returns grown and changed. The Hobbit movies seek to make the story over into an epic, a prequel to LOTR, but lose focus horribly whenever they lose sight of Bilbo's journey.