Freddy Schmucks Movie Redux:
The Battle of a lot of Armies and a little bit of Hobbit
By Freddy Ruiz
This flick is fun and it's eye candy. It's got some cool visuals and a lot of the violence in this thing harkens back to Peter Jackson's old school horror days, but to cap off what is pretty much ten hours of movie with this being the third film, it's more of a crap off than a cap off. Once upon a time a friend told me he thought that Peter Jackson was slowly turning into George Lucas. I thought to myself hell no! "Unexpected journey is an awesome start to the hobbit franchise! There's the music, the fun, the goofiness, the adventure and the friendship I came to love in the book! Sure Bilbo isn't in it that much, but damn it's fun and surely he'll be in the next one a lot!" Then desolation of Smaug came around. The tone changed and there was a lot of Star Wars Phantom Menace like political drama with Stephen Fry's character of the King of Lake town and I could not have cared less.
Then there's a forced cheesy romance between a dwarf and a character, that Tolkien had never created. More Orlando Bloom too! Why not lets show-horn this like Chewie in Revenge of the Sith! Half of Desolation of Smaug wasn't even material written in the hobbit book. I get this is the last bastion for Tolkien cinema, but don't try and put everything in this and call it the Hobbit. I really tried my best not to come in as a fan of the book and strictly see it as a movie, but damn. Half of that second movie was just completely unnecessary. Then we finally get to Smaug! He gets pissed off and flies away. The Desolation of Smaug ends and Smaug is still alive. Cut to a year later for the final entry. What all the trailers are calling the "Defining Chapter."
There are a lot of action scenes that are really cool and the geek in me is just like, "Holy shit I just watched Legolas do more gravity defying crap that would make Yoda go, "Word up!" The opening with Smaug is really strong and once the title "The Hobbit" hits the screen it throws you right into the action of the fell Worm burning the shit out of Lake Town. Remember I said the violence harkens back to peter Jackson's Gory days? Damn do those villagers burn, he does not skimp and you cannot take your eyes off of the flames engulfing everyone and everything. Stephen Fry, aka big bad political oppressive king, is trying to escape with a ton of gold. Bard gets to the highest tower and starts firing arrows at Smaug and misses. Smaug sees him when he's out of arrows and begins talking to him because, when you have Benedict Cumberbatch, you make sure he has at least a page of dialogue or forget it. Then in an act of what I consider to be basic child abuse, Bard kills Smaug and Smaug lands on top of Stephen Fry and it looked really awesome, but Stephen Fry is just dispatched like an afterthought. This character had no pay off from his way too long build up from the last movie. You didn't need to know all that crap to know the king was bad. The dude's character reeks of slime. A five year old could look at the guy and say evil. Another story line not in the book that just seemed to clutter the flick.
Smaug's out of the way and we can bring up the title sequence, "The Battle of Five Armies!" We swept that dragon stuff under the rug quick! We then get what feels like an hour of Bard trying to get money from the dwarves, elves being Pissy Pants McGee, Thorin going crazy over the Arkenstone that makes him king under the mountain like he's freaking Gollum and it's his precious and then of course badass looking orcs. Let's not forget Galadriel randomly coming in and rescuing Gandalf looking like Samara from the Ring. We get two more cameos that do some badass fighting and then are never spoken of again in the movie. Back to the plot of the hobbit! The elves and Lake Town want to be compensated for their troubles and Thorin in his greed says, hell no! All the while a horde of orcs is coming to kill everybody. Bilbo has the Arkenstone and doesn't want to give it to Thorin because he's afraid he'd get all my precious with it. He takes it and sneaks out to give to the King of the Elves and Bard now King of Dale. His thought is, if you give Thorin the stone he'll give you the money you want. Once again Thorin says, hell no, and this time is ready to kill Bilbo. An army of elves and men are ready to kill the dwarves when randomly an army of dwarves comes to help. Now if you read the book you know that the crows can speak and the dwarves send them out to get help from Thorin's cousin Dain of the Iron hills and his army. In the movie you see a crow and they just show up. But Dain is played by Billy Connelly aka Ill Duche of the Boondock Saints! Always a badass riding a giant hog looking like he'll mess things up and he's the only character in any of the movies to use the word bastard. Like Billy Connelly does, he steals the screen for a bit. But he's completely CGI. At no point is he a dude in makeup like the other dwarves. He's completely computer generated and he comes to fight and then he kind of just disappears. Along with Dain a bunch of random characters are completely CGI, much like the clones in Attack of the Clones are never ever played by guys in suits. Some of them are painfully CGI as their faces look like Play-Doh. It could just be me or the fact I didn't see it in the high frame rate or 3D, but it definitely was distracting.
Finally we get to see the battle of five armies as giant worms come out of the ground and a shit ton of monsters come out! The giant worms go away because why would you want to use giant worms to fight anything? Best part of this though is I got to see something I've wanted to see for a long time. A bunch of pissed off Gimlis going at an army of Orcs and they are joined by badass elves as the fight commences and that is truly glorious. As this is going on, Azzog (Big bad Pale Orc) has a battalion going into the ruins with orcs and trolls and goblins and whatever the hell else slaughtering the people of Lake Town and I mean massacring them. It's like Peter Jackson went bloodthirsty on all their asses and there is blood seen all over the ground around the bodies. Nobody is safe. Sounds badass yeah? Then we go back to "My Precious" version of Thorin who refuses of fight. This is in the book where he is consumed by Greed which is why the battle of five armies happens, but in the movie he just holds up in his fort making everyone else fight. His decent into madness parallels what Denethor went through in Return of the King and it is done rather nicely. Homeboy has a fever dream after one of the other dwarves calls him an jerk and he comes to and decides to fight. This delusional sequence I have to say is done rather well and is visually stunning. When he decides to fight it is badass as you feel pumped for the king under the mountain to rally his dwarves and it leads to some great battle scenes. For this moment in my head I was cheering, I must admit, as I had been waiting forever for this. Then while this huge ass battle we've all been waiting for is going on we cut to a couple of the dwarves fighting trying to get to the leader of the Orcs Azzog the defiler. These scenes are cool but it just kind of pales to what I was expecting which was a battle of five armies. Some of the dwarves die and you can probably guess which ones even if you didn't read the book and there's a bunch of emotional crap that you just don't really care about because a lot of it came the hell out of nowhere. This is where the flick gets really choppy.
You stop seeing what is the battle of five armies and see a bunch of fights between some "hero" protagonists and antagonists and you're supposed to feel emotion from some really badly written dialogue and some really confusing motivations and reasoning from some key players that never really pans out to anything. This whole time you see Bilbo once or twice. Like in the book his ass gets knocked out. Then he comes to like five minutes later to watch everything end. The character, the movie is named after, is in this thing for like maybe thirty minutes. He doesn't really do anything except deliver the Arkenstone. Eagles come out of nowhere and you're thinking, "Oh hell yeah!" Sylvester McCoy is riding on an eagle fighting and Beor from the last flick jumps off an eagle and turns into a bear and start messing people up and then the battle just ends. The fifth army comes in and its just automatically over as Azzog is killed. I waited forever to see Beor in action. He's a giant dude that can turn into a huge bear. He has less screen time than Rhino in Amazing Spider-Man 2. I know what you're thinking. "Freddy it wasn't that big in the book. The eagles came and the fighting did end! Bilbo did get knocked out and come to when everything was over!" Fine I'll give you that he went somewhat half-assed by the book. Then why did I sit through two hours of that last movie that was extended for no reason whatsoever? All the extra stuff in the last flick has no payoff here it seems. When they try to make a payoff it just happens and it's nothing fantastic. It seemed like Peter Jackson just thought, "Oh I forgot to tie that loose end up and he wrote down, and the they fight." Much like George Lucas would write and then they fight. Don't get me wrong I love and then they fight. But when that's the answer to everything and there is no weight to why they are fighting I just don't care as much. The fights last like a second and then they're over and were supposed to be cool with that being the resolution. There are some random subplots you see in this but none of them matter and you don't really care. We also get the worst name drop ever as Legolas father banishes him and he says go find one of the Dunedain who goes by the name of Strider son of Arathorn but you have to figure out his name for yourself boogedy boogedy boogedy! Why? Why is that in there and what does it have to do with anything? We get it! He knows Aragorn and meets him but what purpose does that serve him being banished?
Happy day everybody gets what they want and Bilbo leaves. Gandalf says careful with that ring and Bilbo's like whatever I lost it. Now I do like how Bilbo gets home and like in the book his cousins are selling all of his possessions. It's a nice little return to form that I loved in the first movie and then it cuts to old Bilbo and it ends with Gandalf coming over for his birthday shindig from Fellowship. That's it? Return of the king, which back in the day was the "Defining Chapter" of the Lord of the Rings, had 20 billion endings. This "defining chapter" just ends. Nothing is really neatly tied up. Most of the characters don't get a real ending and the ones that do are so half assed and rushed you think it's stupid. The opening with Smaug just ends. The flick ends with footage we could've gone and just watched in Fellowship. I guess the idea was you could go form this straight to Fellowship but damn there is like no pay off for this as a standalone trilogy it's just a service to the Lord of the Rings! That character that Tolkien never made I talked about earlier? She cries and is never talked about again. The jump from the actual battle to the Shire seems like five minutes as we are rushing to get Bilbo home before he turns into a pumpkin.
Guillermo Del Toro did a ton of work on the initial development of the Hobbit and it really shows in the first movie as it is completely different tone and look compared to these others. Peter Jackson took this job not wanting to do it and by the third movie he puts his seal of Jackson on certain things like the gore and action but everything else just falls by the wayside as an afterthought it seems. It make me really wonder what it would've been like had Guillermo stayed on board or if Peter Jackson had gone into this full throttle with desire to actually tell this story. What we're left with is a fun movie but as a whole having waited so long for it and being dragged on so much by the second installment this thing feels really flat. Its bounds and leaps better than part two but it just missed the mark for me. I'm hoping with the release of an extended edition of this I'm proved wrong and the studio just took a lot of footage out that would add some weight to the film but for now I'm stuck having seen a movie that whizzed by with pretty visuals and a couple of expression shots form Martin Freeman. Gandalf is in this. He doesn't fight for much, I mean old Christopher Lee fights more in this movie than Gandalf and that guy can barely walk! Six out of ten I say! Just because you made me nergasm with some badass visuals! Check it out its fun but don't go in with high expectations or especially if you read the book. Not the worst movie of the year but it could have been better.
