Review
The third and final installment of the Hobbit delivers a disappointing conclusion to this trilogy…
It starts right in the middle of a scene that really should have been fully included in Part 2, and from there on it is just a longwinded dwarf-and-battle fest. But without much of a meaningful plot it feels like.
It starts right in the middle of a scene that really should have been fully included in Part 2, and from there on it is just a longwinded dwarf-and-battle fest.
The audience is left watching various grand battle scenes interspersed with what somehow feels like soap opera – really you’re just sitting there waiting for it to end already. And when it does end, after a combined 8 hours, there are still some fairly fundamental loose ends… What happened to the gold that this entire battle was over? And instead of learning what happened to Laketown or Bard the Bowman, we get yet more air time for a shallow and inconsequential elf & dwarf ‘love story’ that wasn’t even in the book…
Richard Armitage as Thorin is pretty much the only character with any depth in this movie; the other dwarves seem to just be there for comedy value. But worst of all is that The Hobbit himself, Bilbo, seems rather irrelevant in this entire movie. Martin Freeman must have realised this during filming, as he looks decidedly bored in the few scenes where he has something to say…
The first installment was extremely slow, the second film was great, but not long into this third movie you begin to realise that you have had enough of this long-drawn-out storyline… Let’s hope that in the coming years, someone cuts this Hobbit trilogy down to size to a single 3 hour movie to salvage this prelude to The Lord of The Rings for future generations…
Film Stills
