Well, that's finally over. Having gone on an
Unexpected Journey and endured the
Desolation of Smaug, Peter Jackson’s bloated
adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s ‘The Hobbit’ finally comes to ‘The Battle of the
Five Armies,’ which is less of a climax to this epic, interminable trilogy than
a distended epilogue. After spending two movies and 330 minutes building up the
dragon Smaug (voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch) as the ultimate antagonist, he’s
eliminated from the story completely in the first ten minutes. He’s gone for
good even before the title ‘The Battle of the Five Armies’ appears onscreen.
The remaining two hours-plus concerns the massive and mostly pointless skirmish
that follows his defeat. With the dragon literally out of the picture, the
previously heroic dwarf Thorin
Oakenshield (Richard Armitage) becomes the story’s villain. The elves and humans
who helped Thorin and his fellow dwarves on their quest to vanquish Smaug arrive
at the Lonely Mountain to claim their rightful piece of the dragon’s treasure,
but Thorin, seduced by gold’s corrupting influence, refuses to share his prize.
Instead, he calls in reinforcements (including, of all people, a CGI Billy
Connolly on a warthog) and prepares for war.
The dwarves are challenged by the elves, led by Thranduil (Lee Pace), and the
humans, led by Bard (Luke Evans). Then the evil orcs, commanded by Azog the
Defiler (Manu Bennett who, in fairness, doesn’t really defile anything), show
up, and attack everyone else. Eventually a fifth army shows up as well, but who
exactly they are and why they’re fighting is mostly left to a few lines of
dialogue drowned out by the sound of grunts and clanging swords.
The battle itself, which takes up more than half of the film and is interrupted
only by occasional character digressions (including a woefully unfunny comic
relief figure who dresses like a
woman to get out of fighting), is visually impressive and tediously repetitive.
Here is the structure: The heroes are brave in the face of impossible odds; they
fight valiantly but are overwhelmed; the bad guys get the upper hand and one of
the heroes appears defeated; out of nowhere, another member of the good guys—say
Legolas (Orlando Bloom) or Gandalf (Ian McKellan)—appears to make the
last-minute save. Then everything resets with another subset of heroes, and the
whole scenario repeats for an hour with the fewest meaningful casualties
possible.
The conflict doesn’t really resolve so much as it stops after a few key players
duke it out on top of a mountain. (I guess everyone was tired and went home
after that.) A few individual moments are well done (Legolas’ fight with an orc
in a crumbling tower is somewhat memorable), but the experience of watching this
movie is like ordering a 72-ounce steak at a restaurant and then being told
you’re not allowed to leave until you eat it all. Sure, the steak’s well-cooked,
but the whole thing? And it’s all just steak? Can’t I get, like, a baked potato
or some steamed broccoli here? ‘The Battle of the Five Armies’ is just a steak,
and an overcooked one at that. There’s no blood in the literal or figurative
sense; to earn a PG-13 rating, the computer-generated characters slash at each
other with swords that do no visible damage. Peter Jackson has basically made a
really good-looking 2-hour video-game cutscene.
Sharp-eyed readers will note that this review is almost over and it hasn’t even
mentioned the
title character, Bilbo Baggins. That’s because ‘The Hobbit: The Battle of the
Five Armies’ barely mentions him as well. Mostly he stands in the background of
group shots or appears, swinging his sword, in sporadic cutaway shots. Poor
Martin Freeman gets to perform the occasional plot contrivance—stealing a jewel,
sneaking around with his magic ring—but he’s basically a glorified extra in his
own movie. At one point in the final confrontation between the dwarves and the
orcs, he’s knocked unconscious, and then literally sleeps through the 20 most
important minutes of the entire trilogy. The MVP Award for the enormous cast
belongs to Ian McKellan, who is even more superfluous to the story than Freeman
but who invests his superfluosness with an extraordinary amount of gravity,
grace, and good humor.
Tolkien completists and folks who just want two hours of mindless 3-D violence
will probably find enough to enjoy in this mess. But now that it’s all (finally)
over, Jackson’s ‘The Hobbit’ feels like a huge missed opportunity, one that
stretched out its source material way past its breaking point for the sake of a
huge financial windfall. The only interesting thing about ‘The Battle of the
Five Armies’ is the fact that its entire story is motivated by greed. Everyone
is fighting over the Lonely Mountain’s enormous treasure; characters repeatedly
warn each other, with little success, to beware money’s destructive effect.
Thorin ignores the warnings and is transformed by his lust for gold from a noble
leader into a covetous scoundrel. But if there is a lesson to be learned here
about the danger of extending thin stories out to maximize profits, it went
unheeded by the filmmakers.
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