Feels thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread.

Rating: 2/10 (14 January 2014)

The Hobbit is a simple and straightforward children's book about finding a dragon, killing it and going back home. How can you possibly mess that up when you start making a film adaptation with abundant resources? Well, let me tell you how they managed.
Poor J.R.R. Tolkien, he's probably spinning wildly in his grave right now. The man that you could with justification call an absolute perfectionist when it comes to the presentation of his work would have never approved of this silly bore fest. Honestly, during some of the fight scenes I was expecting Graham Chapman as Colonel to come on to the screen and tell us exactly how silly it was that we just saw. "An Unexpected Journey" was promising enough to assume that the trilogy would probably not be a complete flop after all, but "Desolation of Smaug" is where everything goes wrong. There's little left to redeem in the end.
OK, the bottom of the barrel first, fight scenes. In Lord of the Rings trilogy fight scenes passed two critical tests: they were (at least if you exclude Legolas) somewhat realistic, and they served a purpose from the viewpoint of the story. Here, we have none of that. Legolas is back with sillier stunts than ever but that's not all. This time, EVERYONE is doing silly stunts, except the orcs of course, who are there solely to get hit, usually in the groin by an axe that has just passed through several pairs of hands of dwarfs that are going down rapids in bouncing, shaky barrels that somehow refuse to sink despite taking in water all the time. Another thing: whenever a central character is threatened in any way, you'll soon learn to ask yourself two questions: which part of the baddies' body is the arrow going to pierce, and who will shoot it?
Need I even talk about the absurd love story between one of the dwarfs and the elven warrior played by Evangeline Lily? It's probably enough if I say it's one of the most forced and implausible love stories ever put on screen. Besides from this romance that kick starts immediately without a viable reason, everything in this movie is so drawn out and slow that Bilbo's quote from Lord of the Rings fits perfectly. You wait and wait for something meaningful to happen, and when it finally does. It. Goes. On. For. Ages. There are good things as well, most notably Martin Freeman does good job as Bilbo and Benedict Cumberbatch is phenomenal as the voice of Smaug. Unfortunately, with a script like this even talented actors can only do so much.
The script. Oh god, the script. I refuse to talk about it. If watching the movie was this painful, how awful must it have been to actually write something so boring? All in all, this movie is bad. Really, really bad. It's not because the crew and cast don't know what they're doing, it's because they're doing too much of everything just to squeeze out as much money as possible from source material that would've been enough for one feature film and no more. Also, the spirit of the source material is forgotten. This is no kids' movie, this is a movie that tries its earnest to be Lord of the Rings without ever having a chance to achieve that goal.
A friendly word of advice to you Peter Jackson: since you clearly wanted to make a movie trilogy that was like LotR, start filming Silmarillion next. There's enough gritty source material for ten movies for you there, and it's all action if you so wish. Drop the silliness you have brought in in The Hobbit though.