Competent but dull, or dull but competent?

Rating: 6/10 (24 November 2003)

There are some tremendously exciting fight scenes in `The Two Towers'; in fact, it's probably Peter Jackson's most excitingly choreographed work since `Braindead.' Most of the cast reiterate the fine performances they gave in the first film, and there are some nice additions, particularly Brad Dourif's hammily rotten Grima Wormtongue. The production as a whole is as focused and thorough and poker-faced as we've come to expect from this team.
But unfortunately, we find that much of the fun we had in the first film has drained away. `The Fellowship of Ring,' for all its critical overpraise, worked in the same way a BBC children's miniseries would--the plot was simple and episodic, but it was always on the move, with our young heroes and their British-character-actor friends and foes tumbling from one scrape to another. It was good childlike fantasy fun from beginning to end. `The Two Towers,' on the other hand, is adult in the least fun sense of the term; it's dominated by its Rohan/Theoden storyline, and as such bogs down too much in the simplistic, boring propaganda of Tolkienian politics. Like the people of Rohan, this subplot pushes itself into a hole from which it is very difficult to get out. This provides opportunity for some grand battles, as I said, but between the flying arrows and battering rams and severed orc heads, not much happens.
The two other storylines are a mixed bag. Frodo and Sam's road trip to Mordor is by far the best part of the film, even if the slippery CGI Gollum distracts too much from the hobbits' character development. This Gollum isn't quite the revelation he's been made out to be; there's a bit too much of a cartoon to him. Andy Serkis's Donald-Duck voice is part of the problem, yes, but most of the fault isn't the actor's. Rather, the CGI animators, for all their technical brilliance, have been allowed to run away with themselves, and the combination of a hyper-expressive CGI face and hyper-chaotic CGI body language makes for a performance that's hammier than it should have been, and could have been. I would much rather have seen a `Dark Crystal'-esque puppet in the role, personally. Still, the interpretation is a well-conceived, respectable take on Tolkien's most human character, and there are times when the animators actually do hold themselves back, and the character finally becomes convincing. Sean Astin and Elijah Wood offer nice, subtle performances, but as I said, it's hard to notice them when that little bug-eyed fellow is mugging for the back row the whole time.
As for the Ent storyline, well, it's a complete wash, as plodding and obvious as the big tree-people characters themselves. It's not so much that there's anything wrong with the look of the Treebeard character or with John Rhys-Davies's voice acting, but Jackson's managing of Tolkien's triptych structure (which split the three storylines into completely different books) doesn't really work here. It's one thing to jump back and forth between the Frodo/Sam and Aragorn/Theoden plots, because things are actually happening in them to move the plot along. (They're not always interesting things, but you take what you can get.) But literally NOTHING happens in the Ent storyline until the very end of the film, and jumping back to it every twenty minutes or so stalls the action terribly. Not only that, it confuses the three subplots' temporal arc--come on, the people of Rohan have debated on what to do, fled Edoras, made an exodus to Helm's Deep, fought battle after battle after battle . . . and Merry and Pippin are STILL riding that miserable tree across the forest?
Yet, for all its drawbacks, the film as a whole may be better than the sum of its parts, and fanboys, as always, will be less concerned with how entertaining the film is than with its minor digressions from the book. Non-fanboys will find it competent, certainly, but also a bit dull. 6.5 out of 10.