A cartoonish, overwrought mess of a film

Rating: 1/10 (15 December 2013)

Before getting into the meat and bones of what I have to say about The Hobbit part 2 I'd like to point out that I'd be giving the film a 3/10 and be happy to leave it at that if it weren't for the extremely inappropriate use of 3D. It added no depth to any scene that could not have been accomplished with proper lighting and cinematography, it only served to distract and obfuscate as soon as anything moved across the screen. This pointless gimmick only ruins the experience.
Now onto the actual film, saying it's no good is putting it lightly. The screenplay is an incoherent garbled mess that makes a mockery of the source work. Scene after scene we get to see characters we love and hold dear behaving inconsistently, hamming it up with lines that make you shake your head and wonder whoever thought it was a good idea to introduce a triangle drama for no discernible reason, among many major complaints. It's downright disrespectful how badly written this tripe is.
And of course there's a whole bunch of completely unnecessary and needlessly drawn out action sequences shoehorned into the movie for no other purpose than filler. Legolas' nonsense athletic feats challenge the suspension of disbelief so frequently and so egregiously that eventually you just throw up your arms in the air and give up.
What purpose is there to an action scene where you don't care for any of the characters? What tension is there when the bad guys are so ridiculously outmatched?
All this added action just ends up ruining the pacing because now you've got too many subplots going than you can reasonably allot time for.
Even the audio is noticeably bad. The music from the LotR films will stay with me forever, the music playing over the end credits here just made me leave the theatre in haste.
Well, at least Smaug was great, and we get a noticeably improved Bilbo this time around.