Too Much Padding

Rating: 4/10 (15 March 2015)

The Hobbit: Desolation of Smaug. Like 'An Unexpected Journey' is's a flabby film that doesn't care a great deal about character. It#'s very pretty (especially Evangelne Lilly), but crow barring so much Middle Earth canon from other tales and, less forgivably, made up toss that is so alien to Tolkien as to be laughable, makes for a leaden and sloppy narrative, whose only concession to pace seems to be having a CGI action sequence crammed in every twenty minutes to keep the audience awake. Cumberbatch's serpentine voice-work as Smaug is the only redeeming feature. They say every good film has a beginning, a middle and an end. This is ALL middle.