With slightly more plot this is a small improvement over the first, but it still has little of the fine character work that made LOTR great

Rating: 4/10 (28 February 2014)

The second Hobbit movie is an improvement over the first simply because it stops for plot. There are two very long, insensibly edited, stupefyingly predictable action sequences, one toward the beginning and one at the end, but in between them there are a couple of hours of dialogue. That dialogue is mostly a string of clichés, and it has only a tangential relationship to anything J.R.R. Tolkien wrote, but at least the characters are talking instead of flinging themselves around in a glaringly artificial whirl of debris and Orc body parts. So that's the good news, if you can call it that. The bad news is that despite the opportunity to correct it, one of the main problems of the first movie is still unresolved: the Hobbit himself, Bilbo Baggins, a literary hero beloved the world over, is effectively absent from the movie that is ostensibly about him and his adventure. Tell me, what does Bilbo think about Lake Town politics, about which so many instantly-forgettable words are bandied? Who knows? We don't see or hear from him during our entire time there. Nor do we hear what he thinks about the intriguing history between the Elves of the woodland realm and Thorin's ancestors, because we are too busy watching the beardless Dwarf Kili (or, who knows, maybe it's Fili! They're all interchangeable and most don't talk!) flirt with a character that Peter Jackson invented! Bilbo, and this is a statistical fact (don't research it, just take my word for it), has less screen time than any title character since Godot. The movie is better when Bilbo is in it, which he is at the very beginning and again towards the end just before a Scooby Doo chase scene starts between Smaug and the Dwarvеs. But as appealing as the intrepid Hobbit is in his fleeting cameos, before you can say "second breakfast" Jackson's rickety roller coaster is off again and Bilbo's out of sight. Maybe in the three-hour final movie Jackson will somehow find time to squeeze Bilbo in, either during the action of the Battle of Five Armies or, if the film can accommodate such luxuries in such a short runtime, during moments of dialogue. For a refresher on how to achieve this sort of thing, Jackson should refer to his own beautiful and character-rich adaptations of the Lord of the Rings.