The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies Review

The structural error is announced within the first ten minutes. Smaug's destruction of Laketown, the biggest event in the book, is dispatched as a prologue because the previous film ended in the wrong place, so this one has to invent a climax of its own. What it invents is a battle, and the battle is the problem. Armies of orcs, elves, dwarves and men collide across a valley in shots where almost nothing has weight, the geography keeps quietly resetting, and giant worms tunnel in and are never mentioned again.

The original trilogy earned its scale on real crowds and real mud; this is a rendered event, and the eye knows it. Alfrid is a comic character with no jokes who keeps returning. Legolas runs up falling masonry in open defiance of the film's own physics. Things do work: Thorin's gold sickness is played seriously and Richard Armitage commits to it completely, Lee Pace makes Thranduil genuinely strange, and Billy Connolly is a welcome jolt of energy. But the deaths land thinly because the film never slowed down enough to earn them, and it closes a trilogy that should always have been a single picture.