"THE HOBBIT: THE BATTLE OF THE FIVE ARMIES" (2014) - ★★

The third and, thankfully, last of Peter Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy, a practical reboot of the original Lord of the Rings movies, is composed of two parts in its dragging 144 minutes. The first is a rather clumsy stumble through an empty script staging as an effective one (it got the drama it was shooting for,) which feeds conveniently, too conveniently, into the second, a long, long, long battle sequence to end all battle sequences. It feels long.

As the movie kicks off, we start to pick out things wrong with it right away. There are multiple storylines, yet we wonder if there’s another more interesting one we can tune into. Our lovable hobbit hero Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman) is in the dragon Smaug’s lair with his dwarf pals he’s spent the last two movies with. Thorin (played by Richard Armitage), the king of some place at some time, is holding them there out of his madness. He’s kind of gotten crazy for riches and wealth at the moment. If that sounds spontaneous, that’s what it’s like in the movie. And then a group of mortal men are trying to get themselves together after Smaug destroys their town. They’re trying to make this guy, Bard (Luke Evans, from the last one as well), their king, but he’s being modest and all and politely declining. It’s too bad, because the film could’ve turned the crowning ceremony into another 20 minutes.

Scenes with Gandalf are thrown in there, and you ease into those ones with the familiarity factor and Ian McKellan at the wheel. But why won’t the camera stay still and stop zooming in for closeups?

Am I supposed to know any of these characters that walk in with thematic music blaring behind? The character’s lines try way too hard to sound meaningful when they don’t even completely work as filler. By the time we get all this bugging us, we’re wondering if this is actually the movie this trilogy is going to end on.

A thought that carries us to the second part, which explains why the first half is so shotty. The orcs are bent on killing everybody, so they walk in. The elves have a beef with the dwarves, so they come in. The men… well, who knows what they want. The movie just wants to push all of these different sides together as an excuse for an all-out brawl, taking up the last hour or so of the film, between the good guys (not the orcs) and the common enemy (the orcs.)

What can I say? The subtitle came first, the story came later.

I’m at a point where I haven’t quite fallen head-over-heels for The Lord of the Rings. There’s adventure on the screen, but it’s shown in a dry sort of way. I somewhat got to explore the scenery the one time I watched them consecutively, but I had to check back in every once and a while with some family feud I’d forgotten to pay attention to. If there’s one thing I can say about Jackson’s original middle earth movies, it’s that it illustrated the human and all its strengths and weaknesses, courage and greed alike. It was intriguing how the physical distance traveled matched the intellectual, and even more so the fact that the journey was centered around one ring that tinkered with all sides of the emotional scale.

There’s no such center or distance in this movie, or any in the new trilogy for that matter. There’s no way to enjoy the action in "Battle." Aside from the fact that it’s poorly paced and uncomfortably frenzied, we fail to grasp a reason for the fighting. There are no emotional stakes, and yet this out-of-place reflective mood is persistent throughout. It’s false. You can’t be faked into believing that you’ve made any journey in these movies whatsoever.

I guess Freeman makes some of the otherwise bland dialogue fun. And there were some pretty cool mountain goats the dwarves used to scale near vertical walls, cool, but not overused. Still, Frodo beats Bilbo in a knockout.

And I didn’t even mention the 48 frames per second thing.