Heavy on clichés and CGI, somewhat entertaining

Rating: 4/10 (12 January 2014)

A hardcore Tolkien fan (as in read all of the HoME!) for some twenty years, I have an uneasy relationships with Peter Jackson's films based on Tolkien's works. While I did not like the Lord of the Rings movies for straying from the books while still pretending to be faithful to them, I loved the first Hobbit film for being a fun adventure movie that did not even pretend to follow its literary source. It was not perfect, but it grabbed and held attention enough for me to overlook its flaws.
The Desolation of Smaug felt... like a high schooler's standard pattern essay transferred to the big screen. I had two problems with it. The first one is that action sequences were too long and repetitive, to the point of being boring (and I generally like pure action movies!). I would cut each major action sequence in half... The second one is how predictable it is. Here is an exposition tying this moment to what's coming next, there is a direct quote from the LotR movies, here is some other way to tie it to LotR... I don't like being force-fed information in such an obvious fashion, though some people apparently found all the tie-ins to LotR endearing...
An interesting thing was, right after I walked out of the theater, I though it was a pretty good and entertaining movie, then I started to mostly focus on the flaws. A week later I saw it again for the "final" opinion - and again, sitting in the theater during the movie I thought that perhaps I was unfair to the movie and it is actually pretty good... but then the next day I could not remember any positives, only the flaws.
To me it felt... insubstantial. A cinematic pulp fiction of sorts...
I think if I were a 10-12 year old boy who has not read Tolkien but watched LotR movies, I would have absolutely loved it. But I am none of those things, which is why I give it 4/10. Maybe would have given it 6/10 when just walking out of the movie...
This will be the first Middle-earth movie that I will not be buying in a theatrical version on DVD since I highly doubt I will want to see it again until the extended edition comes out. It is so boring that I don't even want to discuss it online, like I did with the LotR movies... it took me a month to decide to write this review after all...