The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug Review

Smaug is the reason to watch. Benedict Cumberbatch's voice work is superb, but the real achievement is the animation, a creature that reads as an intelligence rather than a hazard, uncoiling through gold with the sly patience of a landlord who knows exactly what he is owed. The conversation with Bilbo in the treasure hall is the trilogy's best sustained tension by a distance.

Around it the film alternates between the inspired and the inflated. Mirkwood, staged as a claustrophobic fever with the spiders held mostly out of frame, is the most inventive work Jackson does here, and the barrel escape is enormous fun until it forgets about gravity and becomes a physics demonstration. The Tauriel and Kili romance is a wholly invented subplot inserted to put a woman in the cast, a defensible instinct handled clumsily, and it steals time from a story already stretched thin.

The molten gold statue climax is a long computer generated action sequence arriving after the dragon has already peaked. Then it stops in mid air on a cliffhanger with no resolution at all, which is the price of splitting one book three ways. Good in parts, and the parts never add up.