This movie is tremendously enjoyable

Rating: 9/10 (24 March 2015)

This second Hobbit movie was for me not just a pleasure, but a revelation. For the first time, I "got" the JRR Tolkien/Peter Jackson experience. I tuned into the frequency. I tasted the fusion cuisine. I heard the eccentric but weirdly rousing choral harmonies. And this is despite – or more probably because of – never having been a Tolkien fan and being agnostic about the myth-making and, indeed, the prose quality. I never had any dogmatic sense of how the original should be represented or any loyalty to childhood fandom, and in fact I came to The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring in 2001 with some unbelief, though as the Rings series progressed I was forced – with some churlish ill-grace – to admire those movies' mighty ambition and scope. With the Hobbit series, the penny is properly dropping: it's not about Tolkien, it's Tolkien-plus-Jackson, of course. It's morphed into something new.
This movie is tremendously enjoyable, and considering how exotic it is, The Desolation of Smaug is weirdly unassuming. It rattles along, never drags, and is always terrifically likable: open, genial and good-natured. The legend is revealing itself to be a rich and potent source of entertainment. Perhaps the point is, as Graham Greene once said about God, you need a sense of humour to believe.