The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies

What's it about?

Uh, something about Hobbits and the Dwarves who hire them. And Wizards. And creatures and five armies. And something else. I don't know.

Start again.

We finally reach the end of Bilbo Baggins's extended cinematic outing. FINALLY. Anyway, this is The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, previously subtitled There and Back Again.

The film opens with the evil dragon Smaug out to destroy a nearby town. And he's dead before the subtitle comes up. The heroic Bard the Bowman saved the day. But his villagers are homeless and the closest town is in prince Thorin's territory. He wants Thorin to honor his word about helping the people. And Thorin's like "Make me! Pfft."

So everybody comes to Thorin's place to take over. The Elves, the Orcs, humans of many dispositions, giant animals. It's all a mess. Meanwhile, Thorin tries to get a MacGuffin to certify himself king. The other, saner dwarves try to reason with him. Good luck.

There's also a Hobbit, Bilbo Baggins. Bilbo gets a hold of the MacGuffin and tries to reason with Thorin. That's pretty much it for him.

At 144 minutes, it's much shorter than either of its predecessors. But its main battle, which clocks in at about 45 minutes, goes on forever. It was hard to keep up with who was fighting who and why. The end result was like a food fight stretched to feature length. They don't even explain why they called it "The Battle of the Five Armies."

The visuals redeem this adventure a bit. Smaug looked great as always and he made the most of his minuscule screen-time. The giant creatures who participate in the epic battle were pretty good too. Sets, Costume and Makeup designs were also good. Nothing to complain about in this field.

As I think about it, this whole adventure should have been two films at most. The point of the first film was to find Smaug and he's quickly dispatched in this one. It really deflates his menace. We now have a film of little substance stretched over a long canvas. The best part of this installment is that it's the last one. I can breathe a sigh of relief now.