Bad Hobbit

Rating: 3/10 (17 December 2013)

It can't be much fun being an Orc, can it? Not only is your acne so bad you're unlikely to get a girlfriend, but you spend your whole life trying to kill hobbits and dwarfs who are, for all intents and purposes, immortal. Maybe it's only bad ugly Orcs that do the chasing. Maybe there some more appealing Orcs running an organic farm in Orcshire.
Even when they manage to give one of the dwarfs a nick on the leg which, of course, with Orc poison means certain death, he only needs a bit of rub with the special green stuff and he's right as reign. What happened to certain death? Being a dwarf is only marginally better. None of them are allowed a discernible character, and, apart from the clashing accents, they're entirely interchangeable. It might have been better to call them something like Bashful, Doc, Dopey, Grumpy, Happy, Sleepy and Sneezy. That would at least have given them some sort of character and a potential character arc. Sneezy might benefit, for example, from a lesser known property of the Arkenstone, which is clearing up sinus problems.
Apart for the main dwarf (who wants to get the Arkenston, but will its power turn him evil? - anybody care?) and the good looking normal-size dwarf, who gets the fatal cut on his knee, but survives in order to get off with the only woman in the whole of Middle-Earth - doesn't this lack of women suggest a bit of population renewal issue here. How is Peter Jackson going to be able to produce his next trilogy when everyone's died of old age? I'm not sure the whole small-size thing ever worked in any of the Hobbit films. There was some stuff between Gandalf and Frodo at the beginning that almost did it, but after that the dwarfs never seemed very small, and nor did the hobbits. And of course the Hobbit hairy feet thing never convinced – they just look like a pair of unconvincing hairy slippers from the Pound Shop.
Wizards would seem to have the most going for them. They are old and they are wise – apart from the bad ones of course who are old, wise and nasty. Wizards present a slightly harder issue plot wise, because, put them into any seemingly impossible situation, for example, I don't know, hanging off a tower in an iron cage, and all they have to do is go, 'Piff Paff' and they're away. You can't even kill them. Gandalf gets killed by the Balrog in LOTR1, and, Piff Paff, he's back as Gandalf the White in LOTR 2. If he gets killed again he's still got green, red, and blue to go. No wonder Orcs are so bad-tempered – it's like England playing Australia.
Smaug the Dragon does look pretty impressive at the cost of a few million dollars although Ray Harryhausen did better with twenty quid and some plasticine and wire. Still, at least the dragon looks good. Trouble is, he never stops droning on and, even though can blast fire out of his nostrils with the power of six flame throwers, he's a totally useless shot and nobody gets so much as a flaming bum.
And I have to say the dwarfs idea of killing the dragon is a bit convoluted considering they're making it up as they go along. The plan is, to get the dragon to fire up to the old furnace by standing in front of him, so when he totally misses them AGAIN he accidentally starts the fire burning. Then they have to channel the molten gold into a mold of a big warrior and then they're going to melt him down again, and cover the dragon with the molten gold. 'Couldn't we just stab him?' No you can't, 'cause we've need at least another fifteen minutes of the dragon totally missing everyone.
And even after all that he doesn't die, just flaps his wings a couple of times and off he goes – he's worse than Gandalf. It's almost as if Peter Jackson said, 'Oh no, we've killed the dragon and we've got another three hour film to make before next Christmas.
'But we've just buried him in molten gold.' 'Never mind that, I need him back. Oh I know, maybe he can just jump out of the molten gold and shake it all off like water off a wet dog' 'Yeah, that'll do it.'
And there's an awful lot of stuff that seems just tacked on to fill time: For example there's the boatman bloke, who Steven Fry doesn't like and neither does his a cockney assistant. Lake Town is full of extras going, 'I really hope his kills the dragon don't you.' 'Gosh yes. Hurray for the Dwarfs!! 'Shall we do a little dance. People might do that if they were sending dwarfs off to fight dragons off, mightn't they?'
Not wishing to put you off next year's The Hobbit: Three More Hours of Rushing About Pointlessly but, on top of the town hall at Lake Town, there's a giant catapult thing and the Boatman has a special arrow: The-Only-Thing-That-Can-Kill-Dragons-Special-Arrow. I wonder what on Middle-Earth is going to happen in Episode Three? But before that, we've got the four and half out extended edition of The Hobbit: The Despair Of Smaug At Ever Hitting Anyone on Blue Ray to look forward to. In this version, the dwarfs do some more running, and the Orcs do some more chasing, and Smaug does some more missing, and when the dwarfs come back in the boat, there's a real tiger on board, and maybe they can go to this island when there's a huge monkey or where meddling scientists have created real dinosaurs I tell ya. I can hardly wait