The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies - film review: 'Pompous and crude ... a bloated panto'

Peter Jackson's film, starring Martin Freeman and Ian McKellen is a bloated panto with a few inspired beats
The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies stars Martin Freeman as the Hobbit, one of the few fully fleshed-out characters / Picture: Allstar/NEW LINE CINEMA
Charlotte O'Sullivan2 December 2014

What a horrible way to go. Peter Jackson made history with his take on The Lord of the Rings and even the first two instalments of his Hobbit adaptation had their good points.

The kiss off, however, is pompous, crude and bitty. And doesn't even have any nice songs. There are people still traumatised by the singing dwarves in An Unexpected Journey. Not me. In fact, I'm still humming “Misty Mountains” and was looking forward to hearing the two elfen songs that appear at the end of the book (in a chapter called The Last Stage). Music and poetry are vital to Tolkien's vision. But they've been jettisoned, along with so much else.

With the exception of Bilbo (Martin Freeman) and Gandalf (Ian McKellen), the goodies — who gather on The Lonely Mountain after the demise of Smaug — feel paper thin. Be they Dwarf, Elf or Human, they excel in striking poses. We're supposed to cheer them on. I prayed for early deaths.

Dull Bard The Bowman (Luke Evans) and his even duller sprogs Smug love birds, Tauriel and Kili (Evangeline Lilly and Aidan Turner), Greedy but deep-down noble monarch, Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage). What torture to realise, after two and a half hours, that five out of seven of these so-called characters were going to live to a ripe old age.

The Hobbit: The Battle of Five Armies - in pictures

1/9

The sets look phoney. The dialogue, too, rings false. Jackson and his partner, Fran Walsh, (who wrote the screenplay with Philippa Boyens and Guillermo del Toro) have stuffed their film with anachronisms. Oakenshield tells his troops not to “engage” with the enemy. Kili whispers to Tauriel, “I know how I feel...you make me feel alive!”

This franchise has always had undercurrents of body fascism but, here, things come to a head. A minor character from the last film, the Master of Lake-town's lick-spittle, Alfrid (Ryan Gage) — think Uriah Heep meets Widow Twankey — gets a much bigger role. This allows us to see that he not only has rotten teeth (a sure sign of moral decay) but is slightly hunch-backed. The Orc chief, by the way, has a prosthetic arm. To be an upstanding person, clearly, you need to have all four limbs and perfect posture. What a sweet message.

Of course, some things about the film work. Freeman, McKellen and Armitage do their best and their best is excellent. Billy Connolly has a fun cameo. And a few of the visuals manage to surprise. Smaug's blowtorching of Lake-town is full of grace, while Cate Blanchett's Galadriel has an encounter with Sauron that makes her look deliciously demonic (a dead ringer for the anti-heroine in1988 Japanese horror classic, Ring). Sauron himself (voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch) is trippy dippy. We could have done with more of him.

Jackson's film is a bloated panto with a few inspired beats. It's bound to make money, but let's hope not too much. We don't want more where this came from. Tolkien once wrote a 27 line poem called Cat. Some small and beautiful things should stay that way.

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