Smaug rules, and the rest of the movie... is okay (thought I'd say 'drools' didn't ya)

Rating: 7/10 (3 January 2015)

Bilbo is supposedly the lynch-pin of this whole story - hell, it's called 'The Hobbit' after all, and it's about (as the song in the 1977 animated film starts, 'The greeeeatest adventurrrre') - but damn if you'd know it watching the majority of this entry. I say the 'majority' as he does show up in large part at the end, when it comes time to enter the castle in the mountains and the face-off against the dragon, Smaug, who has hoarded over the dwarfs' gold. But with the exception of a few scenes scattered about, it felt like there was a lack of Bilbo, which is a shame since Martin Freeman is so moving and funny and on-point in this role of the quirky 'straight-man' to these much quirkier, rambunctious dwarfs led by who is arguably the real protagonist - or co-protagonist - Thorin Oakensheild.
Let's talk about that for a moment. For what he's asked to do, Richard Armitage isn't exactly bad in the role, not by a long-shot. He is there and present in this character if the hardcase leader of the dwarfs who has a rightful problem with his father, the former king of the dwarfs, being killed. He wants revenge and justice and so on, but the character just feels so flatly written and plain, somehow there was just a little more dimension with the Lord of the Rings trilogy's mirror character, Aragorn. Thorin comes into a scene and makes his declarations, which is what you do in a fantasy epic like this. But I never really felt for the character so strongly or his quest so much, despite the ending of the first film where there is something of an arc between him trusting Bilbo. Again, not a bad character, but something that I wish was a little more strongly written or played dimension-wise.
Like the other two films in this unnecessary trilogy, there's padding. This is like looking at a nervous football player, loaded up so that he doesn't get pummeled. It's mainly in the inclusion of the elves, and an elf/dwarf romance that comes when the dwarfs are captured momentarily and the really handsome one and Evangeline Lilly's elf fall for one another. Oh, and Legolas returns and there's sort of a hint of a love triangle, because these epics need them nowadays. Not bad actors, once again, and Lilly has more than proved herself on Lost to be capable with a bad-ass action heroine as her character is here. But where's the purpose with the main story? There's no connective tissue with this, and just enough (though added not from the Hobbit but from appendices that Tolkien wrote - just that word 'appendices' like an organ you don't need) with Gandalf on his separate quest which will figure in to this whole SIX film epic at hand.
There's enough well-filmed action and peril to keep things moving along not briskly, but in a manner that I at least didn't fall asleep... well, I did get annoyed by a barrel chase for technical reasons (sure, throw in a low-quality go-pro camera in the river chase while you're mostly using the highest-quality RED cameras, sure, why the hell not?) But, at least, the sequence with Smaug is perfect. It's a marvelous CGI creation that ironically brings back together from Sherlock Freeman and Benedict Cumberbatch, who voices and also does the motion-capture work for the dragon of the title. This is a sequence fraught with tension, clever dialog (much of it with Bilbo's riddles, and this is very similar to the animated film by the way), and intense action and suspense. It's what one wants to see from one of these movies, with a dollop of humor as well.
If only the rest of the film had that. Desolation of Smaug is a good movie, on the whole, but it's so uneven that it may frustrate those who aren't already super-psyched to return to Middle Earth anyway.