Overview
Mere seconds after the events of "Desolation", Bilbo and Company continue to claim a mountain of treasure that was guarded long ago: But with Gandalf the Grey also facing some formidable foes of his own, the Hobbit is outmatched when the brutal army of orcs led by Azog the Defiler returns. But with other armies such as the elves and the men of Lake-Town, which are unsure to be trusted, are put to the ultimate test when Smaug's wrath, Azog's sheer strength, and Sauron's force of complete ends attack. All in all, the trusted armies have two choices: unite or die. But even worse, Bilbo gets put on a knife edge and finds himself fighting with Hobbit warfare with all of his might for his dwarf-friends, as the hope for Middle-Earth is all put in Bilbo's hands. The one "precious" thing to end it all.
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.
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…
