Tolkien's Modest Tale Gets Mired In Shallow Action Setpieces and Mediocre Fanfiction

Rating: 4/10 (28 December 2013)

I have immensely enjoyed the LOTR trilogy and even found the first Hobbit movie to be a competent adaptation of the Tolkien novel. Yet DOS is easily Peter Jackson's weakest, most desperate entry: completely smothering, diluting, and contradicting the source material. Worse, it even fails as its own adaptive entry in Peter Jackson's Hobbit tale with paper thin characterizations, bloated and empty action sequences, and a series of plot holes added not only to the Tolkien lore, but also in the plot line concocted by Peter Jackson's team.
MASSIVE SPOILER ALERT:
To keep this a proper length, I'll just say that the first 30 minutes is a mix of abridged Tolkien and weak filler.
The first most glaring plot shift in this alternate Jackson plot line involves Legalos and Tamriel as a betrothed couple, characters who were never in the book, and a preposterous love triangle involving Kili the dwarf. This really insults the intelligence of anyone vaguely familiar with the Tolkien-verse and is just stupidly contrived even when divorced from Tolkien lore. The romance is so undercooked and contrived between Tamriel and Kili that it is extremely difficult to take seriously. A wood elf, of a race/species that had been mortal enemies of dwarfs for centuries, suddenly starts a serious love affair with a dwarf after some clichéd banter and forced sob story. All the while willing to break up with Legalos.
At any rate, everything Tolkien wrote in the Hobbit to expand upon and add charm and suspense to everything up to the Wood Elf fortress narrative was completely pared down to the bone. If not for the love story involving Kili, Bilbo would have rescued them all within 10 minutes of capture--a complete mockery of the Tolkien narrative.
Of course it's clear to see why that part needed to be rushed through: to get to the wall to wall river action! Not only does this whole scene look patently phoney, it may well be one of the most mindless sequences yet created in Jackson's Middle Earth. The heroes become nigh immortal, characters become weightless and defy physics for no other reason than to kill as many orcs as possible as flashy as possible, and the elves apparently have limitless arrow ammunition and can subdue orcs by sheer brute strength. The elves in particular are essentially gods that can only be touched through painfully awkward plot contrivance. Even the most near-impossible stunt in the LOTR trilogy doesn't approach this level of fan-wankery.
However, late in the film, we get more idiotic and pointless action sequences in Laketown. Apparently, orcs manage to infiltrate to town and for some reason the dwarfs and elves are the only residents willing to fight back despite heavily armed guards roaming the streets previously. 'Cuz we don't want anyone else hogging the glory of the elves beating down orc fodder like something out of an Asian martial arts film. To further insult the viewer's intelligence, not a single person is known to have been killed in the assault. Why are orcs considered a threat again? By far the stupidest scene is the depiction of Legalos chasing the orc leader across a bridge to the mainland. That's right, a bridge to the mainland--a conceit that makes the entire infiltration of the city, the entire premise of the island's isolation a complete and utter farce. Why there's not so much as a drawbridge is mind-bogglingly lazy.
Firstly, Bilbo never again wears the ring even though it's the only sane thing to do under the circumstances. Supposedly, Bilbo is being corrupted by the ring which is complete bullocks considering Hobbits are suppose to be immune to its effects for long periods of time. In the Jackson-verse narrative, Bilbo seemingly only got the ring days ago. Bilbo is completely unaffected by it during his adventure in the Tolkien novel with much more time passing with the ring in JRR's narrative. Also, Smaug can supposedly sense the ring on him while he's invisible, but he never does again even while Bilbo is stupidly running around visible. The contradiction especially apparent while Bilbo spends a lengthy amount of time to grab the Arkenstone but somehow it never dawns on him to do it while invisible.
Once the dwarfs enter the Erebor (Smaug's lair) is when the movie goes completely off the rails into sheer camp. They bait the dragon and go through a 20+ minutes chase sequence with Smaug being constantly outmaneuvered and outsmarted by these dwarfs despite living in Erebor for almost 100 years. What was once a dangerous and crafty creature turns into one of the Keystone Kops, unable to torch even one dwarf despite all the foreshadowing of Smaug being aware of the scent of dwarfs. Yet, when they walk right over or under him, he's completely oblivious. At one point, Thorin stands on Smaug's snout, yet instead of slurping him up with his tongue or roasting him with a brief blast of flame from his nostrils, Thorin is given ample time to escape and still impossibly dodge a pillar of flame without so much as a sunburn.
Through all this, Bilbo's role is sidelined for Thorin's Batman-esque heroics. Smaug doesn't even seem like he's really tricked by Bilbo's "barrel-rider" boast 20 minutes earlier--why he even mentions it after being harassed for so long by the dwarfs is anyone's guess. Even when Smaug starts for Laketown on his own (finally!), the most mind-numbing scene occurs where Smaug is lured and then engulfed by a giant dwarven statue melting on top of him like molasses, completely engulfed, then shaking it all off like a wet dog. I honestly couldn't believe my eyes. How Bilbo himself managed to keep himself from being liquified by the splashing molten gold dripping off of Smaug is irrelevant at this point. It's a real capstone of "what were they thinking?" that pervades this film.