Really Bad

Rating: 1/10 (25 February 2002)

Before this film was released, New Line said "We hope to beat Titanic". John Rhys Davies said "This is going to be the biggest film ever". Ian McKellan said "I cried the first time I saw it, you will too".
As the box office and the wave of indifference proves, they couldn't have been more wrong.
Perhaps the arrogance of the film makers is one reason why so many people don't like this film. Perhaps that's why it hasn't broken into the top 50 of the all time "adjusted for inflation" chart.
Me? I was just bored to tears. The story is very, very simple. A group of characters have to take a "magic ring" to a special place where it can be destroyed. Along the way, they run away from some monsters, then they run away from some more and this keeps happening right up until the end. Only there is NO end. The film just stops which of course is a cheap marketing ploy to make you see the next two.
The script is awful. It's like watered down Shakespeare and some lines are such nonsense that there were a few groans in the cinema I saw this in. It also has a total lack of humor which makes it all the more pretentious.
The characters are never fleshed out and some of them take on charachatures. Gandalf is the worst of them all. A caricature of Merlin from the King Arthur stories, he is so 2D he could have been created by Walt Disney.
The direction is average to say the least and it seems that Peter Jackson has no real style of his own. Instead he borrows heavily from the likes of Tim Burtons "Sleepy Hollow". The action scenes are very poorly done and so is the use of CGI.
I wish I could talk about the score but I really don't remember it. The acting is reasonable enough but some of them must have thought "what am I doing here?" when they had to read such banal lines.
Overall it is just a really bad movie. Never living up to the hype and, to be honest, never coming close. No matter how much the cast and crew tell you how great this is, the simple fact is, it's not.
3 out of 10.