Tolkien turning in his grave

Rating: 2/10 (29 August 2015)

This is the only one of the three Hobbit films that I watched, and only because I wanted to see what they did with Smaug. Well, what they did was over-do absolutely everything. Smaug makes a pretty cool appearance, and then slowly morphs into a laughable cartoon character. We last see him flying towards Esgaroth proclaiming "I am fire, I am death," even though we just spent forty-five minutes watching him incompetently failing to kill or even injure even one out of fourteen dwarfs in a ludicrous, blushingly over-the-top, Scooby-Do video game series of scenes. Oh, did I say video game? Well then I shouldn't neglect the tedious, endless, infamous river sequence, where the Dwarfs race down the rapids of a river in barrels, but Orcs somehow manage to keep pace just running along the banks, only to be slaughtered over and over like hapless teddy bears. We even get to see Legolas balance on two Dwarf heads...forwards and backwards! Peter Jackson and crew should do public penance and allows us to dump ashes on their heads for this debacle.