Review: THE HOBBIT: THE BATTLE OF THE FIVE ARMIES

THE HOBBIT: THE BATTLE OF THE FIVE ARMIES  (FANTASY/ACTION-ADVENTURE)
3 out of 4 stars 
Directed by Peter Jackson
Starring: Martin Freeman, Ian McKellen, Richard Armitage, Orlando Bloom, Evangeline Lilly, Lee Pace, Luke Evans, Ken Stott, Aidan Turner, Cate Blanchett, Ryan Gage, Benedict Cumberbatch, Manu Bennett, John Bell, Graham McTavish, Dean O'Gorman
Rated PG-13 for extended sequences of intense fantasy action violence, and frightening images.
Verdict: Peter Jackson's finale to The Hobbit trilogy is good enough, but not nearly as good as it could be.
YOU MAY ENJOY THE HOBBIT: THE BATTLE OF THE FIVE ARMIES IF YOU LIKED:
THE HOBBIT: THE DESOLATION OF SMAUG  (2013)
THE HOBBIT: AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY  (2012)
THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING  (2001)
THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA: PRINCE CASPIAN  (2008)
THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA: THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE  (2005)
The thing about Peter Jackson's trilogy adaptation of The Hobbit, by J.R.R. Tolkien, is that is was always going to be the little, underachieving brother of The Lord of the Rings (LOTR) film trilogy.  Looking back as THE HOBBIT: AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY neared release in 2012, we may have hoped it would be at least nearly as good as Jackson's earlier Academy Award-winning masterpiece, but it didn't make a lot of sense.  The books themselves are very notably disparate in tone; where The Lord of the Rings, as published in three parts, was a dark, weighty epic myth, The Hobbit was a much shorter, and much simpler, adventure story in the vein of Joseph Campbell's notion of the "monomyth," or "the hero's journey."  After the LOTR films set the standard, The Hobbit films would be forced to walk a line between their own source material and satisfying the movie fans.  It definitely did not help when the originally two-part adaptation was further split into three, and more inexplicably, all three were still pretty lengthy films (AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY being the longest at 169 min.).  The Hobbit trilogy cannot quite be what it should be, and cannot be The Lord of the Rings, so it stands somewhere in between in this weird halfway point.
THE HOBBIT: THE BATTLE OF THE FIVE ARMIES (originally titled THERE AND BACK AGAIN) opens just immediately after the credits started rolling in the previous film, THE DESOLATION OF SMAUG.  The dwarf company of Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage), of which the titular hobbit, Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman), is a member, has invaded the fallen dwarf mountain kingdom of Erebor, long claimed by the vicious dragon Smaug (performance capture and voice provided by Benedict Cumberbatch), who has now flown down to the nearby village of Laketown to cause devastation.  Bard the Bowman (Luke Evans) is made the leader of the town when he successfully saves them from the dragon, but the survivors of Laketown are now homeless refugees and turn to help from Thorin and the dwarves, who now claim Erebor and its infinite treasures.  A curse lies over the treasure now though, and Thorin, possessed by its spell, reneges on his promise to help the people of Laketown, and moreover, the ancient dwarf stronghold/treasure trove has recently become the most valued piece of real estate in all of Middle-earth, both for its endless riches and strategic positioning.  This draws in the nearby kingdoms, all who want a piece of the bounty defended by a mere thirteen dwarves and a hobbit, and Thorin, willing to go to war over a cursed treasure, with orcs, elves, men, dwarves and more gathering their armies for the massive imminent conflict.

The Hobbit films, and certainly this one, suffer from an overuse of digital effects, such as frustratingly prominent light manipulation, and in one of this productions most disappointing moves, the decision to make the orcs with motion capture animation as opposed to physical makeup effects and costuming in the way LOTR used them.  A computer-rendered dwarf character feels like 'jumping the shark' though.  The character, Dáin, is a dwarf king who leads an army into battle atop a boar mount, and while voiced enthusiastically by Bill Connolly (who may have also provided the performance capture, but that information is not readily available), inexplicably appears onscreen as a CGI character, while any other notable dwarf character is an actor in costume and makeup.  Perhaps wisely, they never linger very long on the character's face, lest the pixels really sink in, but there's no hiding it.  There seems to be an utter lack of logic as to what characters or effects should be digital and not, and in the end digital always gets the upper hand, as opposed to LOTR's grounded, natural aesthetic that utilized digital effects to their best potential when necessary (apologies for all the Hobbit-LOTR comparisons, but frankly, that's what the film has been sold as anyway).
The action is copious and often prolonged, although we only see occasional moments of the actual titular battle, which mostly takes the background to lengthy showdowns between major characters of to the sides.  Some of it's pretty exciting, sometimes surprisingly grim, and so digital that it lacks any strong sense of consequence.  None of these things are bad necessarily, but feel like they could have been done better.  On the other, the would-be comic relief character Alfrid (Ryan Gage), the sleazy number-two to the old master of Laketown, who more-or-less throws his miserable lot in with Bard, is a dreadful misfire.  While in DESOLATION OF SMAUG, he was small and lightly amusing throwback to low-level bureaucratic slime-balls of Victorian-era fiction, here he takes a slightly more prominent role, cartoonishly bemoaning his situation and berating others regularly in a manner that clumsily flies in the face of everything else going on.
The humor that does work is primarily from Martin Freeman as Bilbo, the best part of the movie, and there's not nearly enough of him.  He's the heart and humor of the movie, a movie that too rarely proves itself beyond being a watchable curiosity.  One major credit to it, within the history of Tolkein onscreen, THE BATTLE OF THE FIVE ARMIES finally provides some justification for one of Tolkien's most glaring (and repeated) cop-outs, if only for itself.  The most welcome addition to the material is the character Tauriel (Evangeline Lilly), and her romance with one of Thorin's company, Kili (Aidan Turner); a welcome, if somewhat corny, vein of emotion to the story.  It's far better than the thuddingly dull first film in the trilogy, and while it's less bloated than second part, it's also less flavorful.  It's an obligatory ending, and ultimately a refreshing one; very large in scale, but not particularly memorable.
THE HOBBIT: THE BATTLE OF THE FIVE ARMIES is good enough, but not nearly as good as it could be.