Another Endless walk to Mt. Doom, er, I mean The Lonely Mountain

Rating: 3/10 (29 January 2014)

Firstly, I haven't seen the Lord of the Rings films but I grew up with The Hobbit as a book, read it and loved it and then I watched the cartoon which I'm sorry to say for all their effort in use of green screen and digital animation excels this film.
Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman, talented actors as they are couldn't save this film. That is the problem when you take a 300 page novel and stretch it out into 3 three hour movies. You have pacing problems and simple boredom. I suppose Peter Jackson tried to fill it up by extending the action sequences with the spiders and the Woodland Elves and the escape thereof, etc, etc. but they become quite dull. Having them spend 10-15 extra minutes fighting spiders or figuring out how to use the barrels to escape the elves whom are racists just because.
Legolas shouldn't exist until later but they wanted a female and what is a film without a love triangle which didn't exist in the book. It got ridiculous the many numbers of what should be fatal accidents they had which turned out to be no big deal. And then 15 minutes was spent trying to determine where the keyhole was in the lonely mountain.
Onto Smaug. Well, the dwarf kindly advised Bilbo to try not to wake him up. He should of just said "wake him up" for all the good that did for Bilbo went about in his cave like a blundering fool. He even called out hello several times in Smaug's cave which had an echo. Then he tossed a bunch of coins and gold cups around. It's a wonder Smaug didn't wake of five minutes before. The best part of the movie was hearing Benedict Cumberbatch voice Smaug because his voice dominated that section of the film. But for the first half an hour, and yes, the dragon interchange was an hour or so, was just conversation between Bilbo and Smaug about this and that. The ring, Thorin's ego, Smaug's ego, showing off for Bilbo, etc. The inevitable hide and seek occurred. Eventually, it was tedious.
Really, as I said, the best part of this film was Benedict Cumberbatch giving voice to the dragon so if you want to see that, get the movie, skip to that part and watch it for the rest is just a waste of time and well the three of us walked out with killer headaches and some nausea. Felt like we were on an amusement park ride gone amuck.