Couple this lack of visual panache with characterless writing of characters who were characterless enough to start with, and you’ve got a recipe for a set of pretty uncompelling action sequences – there’s just no tension when you don’t care whether anyone onscreen lives or dies.
The writing was never The Hobbit Trilogy’s forte, but the screenplay here is messy, bland and quite frankly, dull. Just take a look at the screenwriters’ awkward attempts to emulate Tolkien paling in comparison to moments of dialogue pulled straight from the great man’s original text (A la the game of riddles in Unexpected Journey or Bilbo’s first encounter with Smaug in Desolation).
They at least gave it a go in the first two, but Battle of Five Armies’ screenplay is packed with lazy cliches and insufferably dull protagonists. Even after three excessively long films, most of the dwarves that take up the lead roles remain completely interchangeable. Furthermore, Bard remains a bland moralistic hero type, Legolas’ uncanny ability to gaze into the distance and state the obvious sucks as much as it always did, Tauriel’s CGI badassery only loosely veils her position as the tragically typical female strumpet, and everyone else is just kind of there.
But that doesn’t stop all these “everyone elses” from taking up masses of screen time. After all, The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies needs them to kill the necessary time to justify its status as a full scale cinematic epic. A 90 minute cut would’ve been infinitely more coherent and less baggy than this waffle-y pile of guff, but I guess everything’s bigger in New Zealand, and ludicrously so at that.
The whole film feels like this pointless mishmash of everything Jackson and his team had left over from the previous movies; tossing every conceivable rehashed idea and gimmicky walk on appearance they could find into the mix rather than formulate a proper whole. The problem is, I’ve seen this done better and much, much more substantially three times before – and, to a lesser extent, two more times in the other Hobbit movies – complete with action sequences that actually compelled me, characters I actually cared about, and a story that had an actual whiff of coherence to it. Maybe I’m spoiled, or maybe the actors and crew just couldn’t be bothered to give it a proper go?
In terms of relevance to the story, about half the cast has no need to be there. It certainly would’ve saved me a good hour in the movie theater. Excessive focus on pointless comic relief characters and romantic subplots that go absolutely nowhere are just frilly attempts to cover up Peter Jackson desperately glancing at his watch. When a good 10 minutes of the film is dedicated to following the “hilarious” and completely inconsequential travails of Stephen Fry’s embittered, mono-browed man-bitch from Desolation, it’s easy to imagine a group of shadowy Hollywood execs holding Jackson and his editor at gunpoint while one of their cronies tattoos “longer runtime” to the insides of their eyeballs.
And while we’re on the topic of “hilarity” – or lack thereof – the cheery, sing-song humour of Tolkien’s novel has been all but completely removed from this last installment. There are brief attempts at comedy – most of which fall utterly flat – but the only real laughs that The Battle of the Five Armies offers are the unintentional kind, including one (Inevitably Legolas-related) guffaw-inducing set piece which looks like something Michael Bay would cobble together with his elbows. Call me cynical, but there’s something that looks phenomenally stupid about a poorly CGI’d Orlando Bloom Matrix running up the falling stones of a collapsing bridge in super slo-mo. This isn’t The Hobbit that I and so many others love, this is a crumby action film shot in front of countless, gigantic green screens by a cameraman on autopilot.
Overall, The Hobbit just doesn’t feel epic any more – maybe it’s the exhaustion of watching massive battle sequence after massive battle sequence for over 12 hours of Tolkienian whiz-banging, or maybe it’s the evident time constraints that the cast and crew were under to churn this one out, though it’s probably a mix of both. No-one really seems bothered about it anymore, with everyone sleepwalking through to pick up their pay-checks one last time – one final slog before they can leave New Zealand for good and get back into the real world.
So, is the romance gone? The Hobbit Trilogy was never going to reach the untapped heights of its big Tolkienian brother, but this last, feeble effort from a team chronically low on ideas and desire to actually give a damn sees us leaving Middle-earth for a final time on a bad note. I wanted to like The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, I really did, but this is the kind of aimless, stupid and poorly written filmmaking that should by all accounts be the scourge of modern cinema.
Where did it all go wrong Peter? Where’s the passion?
