Good movie spoiled by being overlong

Rating: 6/10 (18 December 2003)

There are some cases where a three hour movie is a good thing. There are other times when you don't even realize a movie was three hours long. This is not one of them. Especially when the last half-hour of the movie is extremely slow sappy wrap-ups. At the end there were three or four points where everyone in the audience thought the movie was finally over, only to have a loud sigh fill the theater to find another wrap-up scene. There were also numerous scenes in the middle of the movie that were of the slow dramatic variety. That is all well and good normally, but there were too many and each was too drawn out and they helped bloat the total length (and seeming length) of the movie.
Aside from that gripe, the rest of the movie overall was pretty good. The scenery was amazing, and for the most part the visual appeal was very good. The ogres and orcs and trolls were even more ugly than before and the battle scenes were on an epic scale. The acting was pretty good, outside of the dramatic speeches. There are some actors who should not be allowed to make troop rallying speeches and they all had such speeches in this movie.