The bloat starts to set in

Rating: 4/10 (31 December 2013)

I absolutely love long movies. I hate seeing book adaptations slashed to 90 or 120 minute things, and thus am thrilled by such movies like "Gettysburg" which turned a 350+ page book into a 4 hour and 10 minute movie, and thus was able to cover essentially everything in the book.
For a series like Lord of the Rings, where the movies tend to drone on for many many hours, the length is in some cases justified. For "The Hobbit" I figured 2 movies should be more than enough for a tight, thrilling adventure.
But whereas the first movie managed to be fun despite the overly long dinner sequence and other scenes that meandered on, this one gorges itself on pointless dialogue and sprawling scenes that could have been cut down substantially or cut out entirely, and the movie suffers for it.
By my own admission, I don't particularly like Tolkien or the LOTR movies---I think the themes are overly simplistic, the action overly "Hollywood", and the dialogue is stilted, dumb, and often grueling to sit through, but for a kid's thing, or as a solely visual thing, it's great and entertaining. And yet I thoroughly enjoyed The Two Towers and the first Hobbit movie despite this.
By comparison, The Desolation of Smaug feels like the last hour of "Return of the King" spread over 2 hours, with action sequences littered in. And it's more than just "Great scene, long droning exposition, good scene, bad scene, good scene"---the "bloat" is spread almost evenly throughout the entire movie. Virtually every scene goes on at least a few minutes more than it should, like a hair stylist leaving a long luxurious mane of hair rife with split ends and not bothering to clip them off. Even the "big reveal" of the Necromancer being Sauron (not a spoiler) went on just a few seconds too long, and whilst I previously mention I don't particularly like LOTR, I was blown away by the spectacle of the reveal, only to have it ruined when it went on long enough for me to realize, "it's like the White Stripes' video for 'Seven Nation Army'" The confrontation between Bilbo and Smaug is tense and thrilling to watch for all of 5 minutes, and yet it keeps going and starts to become repetitive and dull. At the very least, Smaug openly says he's having fun so you can't bitterly ask "Why doesn't he just kill Bilbo already?" but then this escalates into an even longer sequence (the molten gold plot) that, whether it was accurate to the book or not, could have been completely removed without hurting the movie in the slightest. It seems to even acknowledge what a waste the whole sequence was when Smaug shakes off the gold completely.
Another big complaint I have, which is rather unfair given that it was the same in the LOTR series; the battles. So much emphasis---much more than even LOTR, since they had Uruk-Hai---the Orcs are trumped up as this unbelievable scourge of death and destruction that is seemingly unstoppable, and yet in every single battle scenes, the "good guys" easily waste Orcs with such immense ease that they never break a sweat.
In fact, the only surprising battle sequence is the brief fight between Legolas and Bolg, because Legolas actually ends up with a slight nosebleed at the end of it. That's about as far as any character in The Hobbit has come in the way of having any trouble fighting off the hordes of Orcs. It makes them look like piles of crap, and strains credulity when you have Thranduil panicking hard enough to close the borders of Mirkwood out of fear of the Orcs when the only Elves that get killed by Orcs are the ones taken by surprise.
It's been more than ten years since I last read The Hobbit, so I don't remember much at all or how it unfolds past Smaug. I only hope for the sake of the audience that all the sluggish doting on the story and Middle-Earth lore was done here, and "There and Back Again" is at least as tight and thrilling as the first Hobbit movie was.