The worst installment in the series thus far

Rating: 5/10 (11 December 2013)

About three minutes in to The Hobbit: the Desolation of Smaug we find ourselves back in the company of our merry dwarfs, a wizard and a hobbit as they yet again find themselves fleeing from Azog the incompetent orc, who is attempting to kill them. The scene is fast, action packed and not particularly exciting. When the scene is finally at an end we are served with some forgettable dialog where the company discusses the danger they are in, accompanied by some dramatic background music. It's a sign of things to come. This is basically how you will spend the next 150 minutes or so: long, drawn out action scene, short futile discussion with dramatic background score, new drawn out action scene. Throughout the movie I found myself desperately searching for moments of silence. Scenes that would allow the audience a break from this video game like narrative, but it was almost never to be found.
Now let me shoot in that I like to enjoy brainless action in movies and video games for that matter, but that doesn't mean that it's right for this movie. The Hobbit is an adventure film and should play out like fairy tale. But this fairy tale suffers from a lack of restraint. It has too much action, and amazingly, too much score. It has never been an annoyance in the past, but really, does every piece of dialog have to be accompanied by score? The source material for this film; the passages of the book which describe the long walk through Mirkwood forest, the escape from the elves and the arrival in Lake town are some of the funniest, most memorable and imaginative from the entire book. To my disappointment, all the charming little scenes where Bilbo runs around invisible with his ring to help the dwarfs out of new trouble, are cut short and hastily rushed through. You get the feeling that the director is short on time and has to get it over quickly, but to make room for what exactly? How on earth is it that a trilogy consisting of three 160 minute films, all based on a short book, doesn't have the time to fully delve in to the most memorable passages from said book? Especially when these passages would have given the film some much needed pacing and comical relief. The answer came towards the end. The reason for why the film needed to move quickly was to make room for new elaborate and drawn out action scenes - all of them completely unnecessary for the plot. Now, I am no Tolkien purist, and I don't mind a little creative freedom if it serves a purpose. In the Desolation of Smaug, the only purpose seems to have been to satisfy anxious producers that the film would have enough orc on dwarf/elf/human action, which they obviously see as the only factor that made the three first films a success.
There are no peaks and valleys. Only a succession of ever higher peaks. Every scene seems more action packed or dramatic than the next, with hardly any humor at all, leaving us completely numb to everything that happens. The criticism is one I could also direct at the first Hobbit movie, but it was nowhere near as unrestrained as this one. The Desolation of Smaug is more related to Peter Jackson's King Kong than the original trilogy, and one is left to wonder how the Fellowship of the Ring would have looked like, if it had been made with the same creative philosophy as the Desolation of Smaug. In all likelihood the most charming scenes would have been cut short to make room for an hour-long battle in Moria. Let us only hope that the next film manages to show some restraint in the build up the battle of the five armies.
The only redeeming qualities in this film are the set pieces, which have been wonderfully put together in the same manner of which we have come to expect from the previous films. The polish and color filters could have been toned down a bit, but visually the film is still a masterpiece.