The first two Hobbit movies were uneven in comparison to the emotionally powerful Lord of the Rings trilogy from a decade before, but each of them still had a handful of strong character scenes that presented the important personal stakes amid the sweeping setting of Middle-earth. The Battle of the Five Armies feels like the Transformers of the six Tolkien-adapted films. If you like loud, mindless action (and the box office says that plenty of you do), it's a feast for the eyes and ears. But there's very little there for the mind or heart, and that's a disappointing place to end a series of movies that started out with Oscar nominations (and a Best Picture win, for The Return of the King).
It all starts out with a rather awkward 10-minute opening that should have just been the final 10 minutes of the last film. Peter Jackson's desire to end The Desolation of Smaug on a cliffhanger may have been the most expedient way to let audience members (unfamiliar with decades-old spoilers) know there was still more story to come, but it critically compromised the narrative flow. Because this new film starts immediately with action -- Smaug attacking Laketown -- there's no time to reestablish who these characters are. Consequently, everyone comes of generic. Smaug is an angry villain for vague reasons. The mayor of Laketown deserves to be punished, though it's hard to recall exactly why that is. Bard is a generically heroic archer, the new Legolas (who even looks a bit like him), whose backstory about family failure from movie two isn't even mentioned again here.
The next 30 minutes or so contain some of the only quiet scenes of the entire film (though even these are cut with the whiz-bang rescue of Gandalf). The problem with this material, to couch it in legal terms, is that it relies on "facts not in evidence." Dwarven leader Thorin suddenly gives into a vaguely magical greed that seems to affect no one else. Bilbo (and one or two other Dwarves whose names we can't remember) prevail on friendship to try to talk sense into Thorin, but any demonstration of those friendships are one or two movies (and years) ago. The unfortunate result is that a lot of characters seem to behave inexplicably poorly, just to facilitate the titular battle.
That battle does soon arrive -- and it's bigger and bolder than Helm's Deep (from The Two Towers) and Pelennor (from The Return of the King) put together and doubled. It goes on for an hour, and it's full of Hollywood-style set pieces. Taken individually, any one of the gimmicky situations within the battle might be rather fun. But played out in a relentless chain, they start to get silly. The strained credibility snaps entirely when you're asked to believe that a handful of people could turn the tide of a battle this big. From there, you'll laugh openly at Legolas' acrobatics, roll your eyes at hand-to-hand fights that feel drawn from the sillier James Bond movies, and throw your hands up at the deus ex machina that resolves it all. (Even if you know that that last part, at least, is exactly how Tolkien wrote it.)
The volume (audio and visual) is so maxed out for so long that you simply become numb to it, then you start checking your watch regularly as this shortest of the three Hobbit films suddenly starts feeling like the longest. But now having fairly well trashed the movie, the fair thing to do would be to point out that it's really no worse than any other loud, dumb Hollywood action flick. In that company, in fact, it's probably better. The visual effects look generally better in this final chapter than in the preceding two. The geography of all the battles -- both army v. army and one-on-one -- is almost always clear, rarely getting visually confused as so many "handheld camera" action sequences in other films do.
And through it all, you have some solid actors doing the heavy lifting to inject more into the film than is on the page. Martin Freeman is a freaking rock star at it, but solid work is also done by Ian McKellen, Richard Armitage, and Luke Evans. They are the edge this movie has over common action fare. Vin Diesel or The Rock are never going to draw you in and make you care the way the cast of The Hobbit does.
Ultimately, if you've come this far with The Hobbit films, you might as well finish the trilogy. But I would seriously suggest The Battle of the Five Armies as one to skip in theaters and catch months later at home. I grade it a C.
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