This movie was called "The Hobbit" right? Not "The Wood Elf"

Rating: 6/10 (18 December 2013)

I made the sad mistake of seeing the midnight showing for this movie,expecting to see another faithful installment of a Tolkien book. I understand movies take liberties that sometimes have well-received results, but when you take away the main characters for a chunk of the movie, add pointless, cheesy action-comedy, and a BEAR HUMPING A ROCK for a minute, these liberties become insulting.
Before I continue hating on the film, I will admit the movie holds some fantastic scenes. The scenes with the giant spiders were engrossing, well-paced, and completely rewarding, expounding on all the key elements of the book. Mainly, all the scenes that actually had Bilbo in them were spot-on.
Then we get a bear, the animal part of Beorn the "skin-changer," which I honestly could not tell you what it was doing, but all I saw was a silhouette of a bear mounting a boulder and humping it into submission. From there that's when the movie started going down hill for me (I suppose I should have taken that scene as a metaphor for how Jackson is going to treat all of us with this movie). Later we get a dragged out scene of the dwarfs and Bilbo in the barrels, and this is where Legolas pretty much takes up the rest of the movie until Bilbo sees Smaug. It's him stepping on the dwarfs' heads while shooting his apparently infinite supply of arrows and getting perfect shots every time. It gets old very quickly. I actually got up to use the bathroom at the beginning of this scene, thinking I wasn't going to miss anything important and that it would be over by the time I got back. When I did get back, it was still Legolas jumping on dwarf heads, and I asked my friend if I missed anything, and he just pointed to the screen and said, "Just more of this." If nothing else it was a nice intermission. It felt like Jackson saw some charts showing the popularity of Legolas and decided to throw away any art of adaptation and focus on crowd pleasing. Not only does Legolas get too much unneeded screen time, Jackson doesn't even expound on his character. It's more of him being even more perfect than he was in The Return of the King, and the one time he starts to lose a fight, he gets a bear-hug from an orc and a little nose-bleed.
Later another great scene comes with Bilbo talking to Smaug. I won't go into detail, but the conversation is well scripted and the actors do a superb job of giving all the tension of the riddle scene with Bilbo and Gollum from the first movie. Sadly, this perfectly good scene goes into another scene where Smaug suddenly becomes incompetent, failing to catch any of the dwarfs or Bilbo in its own home (where it's lived for over a hundred years) and becoming embarrassingly easy to out-smart.
I think if this movie was edited down by about an hour it would have been much better. I like the idea of adding Gandalf's story where the Hobbit only hinted at, but they get bogged down with tedious conversations and poorly done CGI. It was painful to watch how much it ruined what might have been an epic scene between Gandalf and The "Necromancer."
Mostly, all the parts Jackson did that followed the book (more or less) were very well done, but all the parts he added were either poorly presented or just tedious and unnecessary.