THIS IS A BITTER ADVENTURE, IF IT MUST END SO; AND NOT A MOUNTAIN OF GOLD CAN AMEND IT.

And thus does one of the most ill-considered experiments in franchise extension end precisely the way it was bound to end. The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, the grand finale of director Peter Jackson's three-part adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's 1937 children's novel, feels like a weirdly-shaped movie fragment and not a movie at all. Though it's still perhaps the best individual film of the trilogy, if only by default. It starts out terribly, finds itself by the end of its first hour, starts to lose the thread during the wandering titular battle sequence that can only boast about its mass, and not its narrative momentum nor its visual excitement, and finds itself again in the last 15 minutes or so, when it refocuses itself on the hobbit whose status of protagonist has been more nominal than actual in two of three films now. So that's a lot of losing and finding and losing, but in the aggregate, the film ends up with more satisfying material, percentage-wise, than the achingly slow-paced The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, which kicked things off (barely) in 2012, or the meth-addled flitting between ill-constructed subplots in 2013's The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug.

The film's biggest problem is the obvious one: not, precisely, the decision to break the meager little book into three long tentpole films, but the way that decision came up so late in the game. Initially, the idea was to make The Hobbit into a two-part adaptation, and the revised concept came after the script was written and principal photography was completed, and the material had been shaped into two individually contained features. Jackson and fellow writer-producers Fran Walsh and Philppa Boyens did a solid enough job of fashioning An Unexpected Journey into a fairly cohesive thing even after chopping its end off and bloating it up with extraneous material in the middle, but The Desolation of Smaug felt at once too rushed and too aimless in all its padding, and the cliffhanger ending tacked on after its somewhat functional third-act climax made it feel needlessly unfulfilled in a way that none of the team's earlier Tolkien films had. But the worst of it is only now coming to fruition: for if The Desolation of Smaug is kind of a self-contained object with the illusion of a final act, The Battle of the Five Armies is that film's actual final act, bafflingly inflated to 144 minutes and given no first and second acts of its own. It's literally about virtually nothing but the run-up to its battle and the battle itself, trying desperately to buttress that with enough character scenes to feel like it has some kind of self-contained arc.

The movie is never worse than in its hectic opening, which abruptly picks up with the massive dragon Smaug (voiced and motion captured by Benedict Cumberbatch) flying to destroy the lake town of Esgaroth, outside of the lonely mountain Erebor where he lived for many years in evil isolation, until some dwarves riled him up by dousing him in gold from giant molten statue. Fuck alive, the end of The Desolation of Smaug was asinine. So Smaug burns the hell out of Erebor, until he is eventually taken down with an enormous black arrow fired by the brave pessimist Bard (Luke Evans), who has been prepared for just such an occasion. I admire any film with the instinct to hit the ground running like this, but Smaug's attack is not at all suited to the function the film requires it to serve, and we're never really invited back into Jackson's Middle Earth so much as we are plopped there. As the film clumsily juggles characters and plot developments that follow as the Esgaroth populace re-orients itself and marches off to Erebor to demand their share of Smaug's treasure from newly-reinstated dwarf king Thorin (Richard Armitage), the blunt-force style of storytelling only really serves to call attention to how little reason we've been given to care about any of this even slightly. Near the end of the overall sequence, a dog wandering through the bottom of the frame looks straight into the camera in a manner that suggests it's trying to get out of the movie, please, and boy, did I ever feel for that dog.

The opening sequence is the most aimless, trivial, aggravating part of a film that swoops from grandeur and the best filmmaking of Jackson's career since The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King all the way back to tin-eared dialogue and embarrassingly amateur shot set-ups and editing at a fairly regular clip. The Battle of the Five Armies is at one and the same time far too indulgent in stretching barely any narrative content out to some two and a quarter hours of movie, pre-credits, while hectically rushed in its depiction of what little bit is there. The subplot from the last movie that found the wizard Gandalf (Ian McKellan, never less interesting in the role) trapped in a ruined haunted fortress is bluntly disposed of in about five minutes featuring weird cameos from Cate Blanchett, Christopher Lee, and Hugo Weaving; Stephen Fry's nefarious master of Esgaroth evaporates from this movie so quickly that I kept assuming he'd show up again.

Meanwhile, plenty of lengthy, soporific time is dedicated to politicking between elves and men, between dwarves and elves, and to maneuvering armies into place before they actually start to fighting. And a great deal too much time is turned over to the allegedly comic scallywag Alfrid (Ryan Gage), who gets himself into the most hellishly unentertaining scrapes and represents the single most ill-advised choice in this series, even worse than the dismal introduction of a romantic plot between dwarf Kili (Aidan Turner) and elf Tauriel (Evangeline Lilly), the latter of whom makes it almost two-thirds into The Battle of the Five Armies before devolving into a generic action grrl damsel in distress. Some of this works better than other parts, and generally speaking, the tension the filmmakers creak out of the build-up is better than the actual fighting itself, which gets to be a bit numbing. And in the case of the protracted (so protracted) battle between Thorin and his CGI orc nemesis Azog (Manu Bennett), it's both numbing and boring, since the film's obvious hope that we'll regard this as a great clash between lifelong enemies is undercut by the crappy development of Thorin over the trilogy, and Armitage's limp performance thereof, and the complete absence of any development of Azog.

Regardless of the rest, nothing is better than when Martin Freeman's Bilbo Baggins is the focus. After being rudely sidelined in The Desolation of Smaug, the ostensible lead character is back to getting enough screentime to feel like he matters again, and he's used as well here as in any other point of the trilogy. The point of hobbits, really, is to domesticate high fantasy; this was their function in both of Tolkien's novels featuring them, and it's something that Jackson & company have never grasped better than they do here, using Freeman's comic fluster as a way of lightening and humanising (hobbitising?) the clashes of battles, the ponderously portentous dialogue, and Howard Shore's emphatically epic score. Freeman, I am more convinced than ever, is the most interesting performer in the entirety of the Jackson Middle Earth franchise, playing a character whose arc and emotions he has thought about far more than the writers ever did, and making his interpretation all about Bilbo, not about the enormity of the films themselves. It is a little performance, a silly and friendly performance, and a very true performance, and because of all this, it is the absolute, clear highlight of a sloppy movie.

Sloppy, but not without its compensations. Limited to basically just three locations - the ruined city outside the dwarf keep, the dwarf keep itself, and an enormous iron hellgate - the director's tendency towards gawking at his sets is tamped down a bit, and instead of feeling like a travelogue for a CGI-aided New Zealand, The Battle of the Five Armies actually starts to use the camera to shape the action and provide a sense of scale; it is the only one of the Hobbit movies to come even close to attaining the visual sweep of all three Lord of the Rings pictures. Even some of the least interesting moments, like the Thorin/Azog fight, are pepped up by the introduction of winter, adding a harsh edge of white to Andrew Lesnie's characteristically postcard-like cinematography. And for the first time in three films, there's no obviously weak CGI: some of the close-ups of Azog and other computer-made creatures probably could have done with a bit less bright, direct lighting, but there's not a single shot that matches the tacky video game aesthetic of An Unexpected Journey, especially.

In essence, it mostly works as a popcorn movie: a fatiguing popcorn movie whose action scenes are repetitive and occasionally too ridiculous to care about (once again, Orlando Bloom's forgettable Legolas shows up to turn things into Mario game), but which are presented with a passion and gravity that feels so, so much better than the meandering idiocy of the last two movies, and punctured by Freeman's wonderful low-key comedy when it all threatens to become top-heavy with pretension. It proves that the whole idea of a three-part Hobbit was a ruinous idea for more than it ever comes close to redeeming the first two, and it still feels like a paltry return to Middle Earth that would have been better left undone. But it has its moments. And next year, when the single-movie fan edits of the trilogy are complete, I don't mind supposing that some of the loveliest stuff will be in the 20 or so minutes that come out of this last movie.

6/10

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THEY KNEW THAT THEY WERE DRAWING NEAR TO THE END OF THEIR JOURNEY, AND THAT IT MIGHT BE A VERY HORRIBLE END

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug had every reason on Earth to be clearly and significantly better than The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, but it's much closer to being a dead heat. This ends up being far, far more depressing than An Unexpected Journey was in isolation, for there was still hope after that movie. Now there is not, for the dragon bits have been mostly used up with this film, and we've all known all along that the dragon bits would be the best part of the trilogy or tetralogy or septet or however many films Peter Jackson and company figured they could extract from a slender, brightly-paced children's book.

What isn't the case, to a shocking degree is that The Desolation of Smaug is variably weak and strong in the same general ways that A Long-Protracted Journey was. For two films made by the same crew and as part of the same production schedule, they are wildly different. They have, in fact, almost precisely opposite flaws: where the last film inched by with a slavish devotion to J.R.R. Tolkien's 1937 novel that crushed any sense of imagination or pacing, The Desolation of Smaug runs screaming from one plot point to the next, barely stopping to let anything sit and simmer and become rich and good. It invents huge swaths of totally new material, leaving even the plot points that Jackson, Fran Walsh, and Philippa Boyens kept intact from the book feeling totally different because the context is so different; and where An Unendurable Journey needed, desperately, to break free a bit from the shackles of the book, The Desolation of Smaug is absolutely at its best when it's hewing closest to Tolkien and vividly, even objectively, at its worst when it is furthest away.

For also unlike its predecessor, it's spectacularly uneven. The opening 30 minutes and much of the last 30 are all pretty fantastic, far better than anything in the first movie save for its wonderful Gollum scene; but the middle of the film is a godawful wreck, as is the wildly inconsequential, jammed-in action setpiece that closes the thing. Moreover, the whole thing suffers, badly from a strange decision to refocus attention from the hobbit of the title to literally any other possible source: Martin Freeman's Bilbo Baggins is still very much the best performance in the film, and at his best moments still reaches the highest heights that any actor in any of Jackson's five (so far) Middle Earth epics have reached, but there are literally 20 minute chunks of the film where he barely even appears in the background of shots, and if someone were to tell me that he has less than 30 lines in the entire 160-minute feature, I wouldn't doubt them for a moment. That leaves us with no protagonist, but just a collection of ensemble-driven vignettes, and since The Hobbit across two films has only really bothered to establish four characters, most of those vignettes hang around people we have no reason to care about.

The plot, anyway, opens with a prologue that establishes Gandalf the wizard's (Ian McKellen) secret reason for wishing the exiled dwarf king Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage) should retrieve his kingdom at Erebor, the Lonely Mountain, from the dragon Smaug (voiced and mo-capped by Benedict Cumberbatch), and this leads into Gandalf's very own B-plot, in which he leaves Thorin's band of 13 dwarves and one hobbit to go hunting in the ruins of Dol Guldur, where a malevolent being naming itself the Necromancer (Cumberbatch also) is working to build an army to conquer Middle Earth. Meanwhile, that same band, after a dodgy, ill-expressed layover with a were-bear named Beorn (Mikael Persbrandt), enters the foreboding forest of Mirkwood, hoping to arrive at Erebor more quickly than a circuitous route could provide, eventually falling afoul of the insular wood elves led by King Thranduil (Lee Pace) who live in the last relatively clean part of the woods. One thrilling escape later, the dwarf band arrives at the town Esgaroth, built on a lake at the foot of Erebor, where a local named Bard (Luke Evans) helps them to hide from the vain, tyrannical Burgomaster (Stephen Fry). Eventually, once Thorin's goal comes out, the people of Esgaroth are thrilled to put their lot in with the dwarves, convinced that this is the arrival of a prophesied king who will defeat the evil Smaug and bring peace and prosperity back to their village. Thus does the party, slightly reduced from sickness, journey all the way to the Lonely Mountain, where Bilbo is obliged to go deep into the depths of the former dwarf empire and parlay directly with the great dragon, whose amusement at the mewling size of this burglar is the only thing that keeps him from eating the hobbit outright.

That, hectically-expressed, is the whole plot of Peter Jackson's The Desolation of Smaug, which is not exactly the same as the plot of the middle third of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit, but the point is the largely the same in either case: was there a need for a love triangle between an elf woman, an elf man, and a dwarf? Absolutely fucking not, and yet that is something present in the film regardless, and while it takes up only a little bit of screentime - 15 or 20 minutes all told, about the same length as any other individual plot in this overstuffed, jaggedly-paced, slurry - it is a deadly dull stretch that exemplifies the weirdest thing about this movie. Allegedly, the reason there are three Hobbits, instead of a nice sane two (we'll agree that one was just too damn much to hope for), was because of the amount of material to fit into it. Fine and dandy, but then why does The Desolation of Smaug consist to such a degree of material either changed to the point of being unrecognisable (the Beorn scene), augmented far beyond what Tolkien ever needed to get the same plot across (the political thriller that unfolds in Esgaroth), or straight-up invented? I get the need for even a single female character, and thus Tauriel (Evangeline Lilly); I get that it makes narrative sense for Legolas (Orlando Bloom), the character from The Lord of the Rings beloved by virtually nobody including the book's author, to show up; I don't get at all that the way to make this happen was by resorting to such a lazy, sexist notion as the girl who really loves this one guy - the designated "sexy dwarf", Kili (Aidan Turner) - while the other guy who loves her just rubs her the wrong way. Particularly in the overwhelmingly sexless universe Tolkien created.

Anyway, the film is insanely full of such pointless inventions that I would say distract from the plot, except that the secret is that The Desolation of Smaug lacks a plot: the book was already largely episodic, but An Unexpected Journey sidestepped this by giving itself an overriding villain and a character arc for both Bilbo and Thorin that was, unfortunately, largely resolved by the end. The Desolation of Smaug practically brags about how little flow there is between events, and the only reason it has any shape at all is because we know that this is a trilogy, and getting to the dragon's lair is a major point in that trilogy. But there is absolutely nothing that resembles a self-contained narrative (I suspect, with horror, that the Tauriel-Kili story was meant to provide that spine), and the film ends on an outright cliffhanger with nothing resolved. It should be pointed out that in the book, this same point is actually more of a narrative pause that makes sense, since Tolkien didn't throw in a spurious action scene that actually makes the film less coherent, and leaves Smaug's final actions in the film not just unmotivated, but completely irrational (indeed, the whole action sequence suggests that this ancient, ingenious monster is a big dumb animal who can be buffaloed as easily as the antagonist in a Bugs Bunny cartoon).

The film lives and dies, then, on the strength of its individual sequences, and these live and die almost entirely based on how closely they drift towards outright horror. For horror was the genre in which Jackson first made his name, and it is still the genre that he does best (in all three Lord of the Rings films, but especially The Return of the King, as well as in King Kong, the most vitally-directed sequences are the most horrific), and two of the three most successful sequences in The Desolation of Smaug are among the most explicitly horror-like scenes he's directed since the 1990s. One of these is the trek through Mirkwood, where outstandingly spooky production design and perfectly-chosen camera angles to create maximum disorientation and fear combine to make one of the best haunted woods I've ever seen in a movie (and the culminating fight against giant spiders is the film's best setpiece, anchored in mood and character rather than CGI choreography); the other is Gandalf's hunt through a haunted place called the High Fells, the one time in either Hobbit film that feels like it reaches the same terrible grandeur of the more epic moments in The Fellowship of the Ring, and I am here primarily thinking of the mines of Moria.

The third great sequence is the chat between Bilbo and Smaug (making this twice in two films that the highlight is a conversation between Freeman and a CGI effect), which also happens to be the scene most identical to Tolkien's book. This is in part because of two great performances, in part because of the cat-and-mouse thriller choreography, and in huge part because Smaug is such a fantastic visual effect: easily the best-looking movie dragon that I can think of, both in design and execution. It comes at exactly the right moment to redeem a flagging movie and almost leave it on a high note (that climactic chase scene is a movie-killer), and that would be the most irritating thing of all: no matter how much The Desolation of Smaug gets wrong, its successes are terrific. The effects are good if not great (better across the board than An Unexpected Journey, though the presence of CG, rather than practical orcs is still a problem), Howard Shore's increasingly derivative score gets the pulse quickening, cinematographer Andrew Lesnie once again makes New Zealand look so beautiful that it's sickening. We cannot write The Desolation of Smaug off as quickly as its predecessor, this is all to say. But for the exact same reasons, we can be even more frustrated by how much of it simply doesn't work at the levels of plot, character, or imaginative filmmaking.

6/10

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