Fairly good action film that could have been great!

Rating: Null/10 (14 December 2013)

Its better that AUJ, but could have been a lot better. Once again Jackson spoils things by trying to make the Hobbit as epic and big (or bigger) than LOTRs. The good bits.The film starts well (Bree) and moves at a fast pace so no one can moan about it being slow or boring. The cgi is better and as usual Alan Lee and John Howe have made all the new locations look great. Beorn's brief scenes are good, Mirkwood is creepy and the spiders scene is excellent, here Bilbo gets to shine and rescue the dwarfs and having Legolas and the elves turn up to extend the action also worked well. The Woodland realm was good with a good performance from Lee Pace and again Bilbo saves the day by rescuing everyone. The Barrel escape is very good with some nice cgi and good action. Lake town looks great and Bard's extended role works well. I had no problem splitting the dwarfs up here as this gave Bard more screen time. Smaug looked great and was voiced amazingly. His scenes will Bilbo were great he really came across as a vain, powerful, sly, evil,intelligent dragon. Gandalf in Dol Guldur also worked well, it showed Gandalf using his magic very well and the confrontation with Sauron was great.
The Bad bits. Gandalfs pointless visit to the Nazgul tombs, it almost felt like it had been put it just so Gandalf wasn't off screen to long. Tauriel and Kili, this is a stupid addition to the story line, I had no problem with Tauriel as an action elf female killing orcs but for her to like a dwarf was to much. The way Kili looks to human has always annoyed me, now we know why, so an elf can fancy him!!! Their first scene in the elven prison was OK but it was the forced, cheesy healing scene in lake town that was painful to watch, the fact that it was a rip-off of Arwen healing Frodo made it even worse and afterwards when Kili woke up and was saying some drivel about love and he went to hold her hand- painful to watch. The ending with the dwarfs versus smaug using the forges,was way to over the top and after Smaugs intelligent intro with Bilbo this scene made him look stupid the way the dwarfs kept evading him. Like in AUJ you wonder how none of the dwarfs died in these scenes with Smaug and all his fire, and the part with e giant gold statue!!! This entire extended action scene with Smaug was my worst part of the film and left me feeling empty when leaving the cinema (Despite all the previous good parts mentioned above) It once again showed that Jackson thinks that every scene has to be action packed and over long to be good, he succeeded with the Extended spiders, barrels scenes and Dol Guldur but for me failed badly with this extended Dwarf - Smaug confrontation ending. Overall I feel let down again by Jackson, it was a good action film but doesn't come close to the LOTRs in any way. I'm scoring 7.5/10