An uneven mess of a movie, the final installment of the Hobbit trilogy feels rushed and unnecessary with only flashes of what made the series worthwhile.

Resolving what should have been the end of the Desolation of Smaug before diving into a drawn out set up for a yawn worthy battle, the Battle of the Five Armies finishes up the story with Thorin (Richard Armitage) feeling the effects of his newly liberated hoard of gold and the ensuing madness that comes with it while the elves and humans come to collect on their owed rewards from the vaults. A stand off ensues after Bilbo (Martin Freeman) hands the Arkenstone over to Bard (Luke Evans) and eventually some orks show up and the titular battle ensues.

I have been a big fan of Peter Jackson’s work for a long time. His Lord of the Rings trilogy was amazing and despite problems, not the least of which was the artificial expansion of the source material, I enjoyed the previous two Hobbit movies but this last installment is a massive disappointment and shows why it is a bad idea to stretch a relatively short book into three movies. There is not nearly enough there there and a 45 minute battle sounds pretty sweet on paper until you realize how sloppy the whole thing looks and feels. But more on that in a bit.

My first problem with this movie is that the ominous cliffhanger ending of Desolation of Smaug was definitely not worth how much of an after thought Smaug felt like in this installment. Smaug is dealt with very quickly and while the events are still connected it would have made a lot more sense for him to have been dealt with in the last film and left this one to deal with the ensuing dwarf madness and conflict. As it is, the dragon’s attack feels like an afterthought and bears very little dramatic weight.

Maybe the Smaug material would have come off better if the effects had been better but right out of the gate the CGI in the film looks really sloppy. I have come to expect a lot more from Jackson and I was very disappointed when the dragons on Game of Thrones look better than Smaug does here. Unfortunately, this is just a taste of things to come.

The effects in this movie are enormously uneven and for every shot that looks great there are several more that look terrible. This is especially problematic when  a large portion of the film is a battle  and attempts to make the characters look like they are doing badass things look like graphics from a PS2 game. I have to say I really have when film critics dismiss an effects heavy movie as looking like a video game but that is fairly apt here, particularly when Dain (Billy Connolly) shows up. If the effects at least looked new gen that would be one thing but this looked like the sort of thing from a video game from the 90’s. There were some really cool and impressive effects as well but they cannot counter act how bad the other shots are and how often they are bad.

The choreography of the fighting in the battles is very poor as well. There are only so many times that I can be impressed by someone spin moving their way through three or four attackers and that number of times was exhausted almost immediately when the battle started. When you add that to the number of times one character stands over another character with weapon raised only to be blocked by another surprise character who is there just in time and you have a massively repetitive and boring battle. There is a particularly non-sensical rally moment in which a much smaller force than would be good for anything manages to turn the tide as well but by that time I had really kind of given up.

Individual characters get to have prestige battle moments but here again these are often hamstrung by bad choreography and poor special effects. Legolas (Orlando Bloom), a reliable go to character for badassery throughout the rest of the films, is hurt the worst by this as his moments to shine are dulled considerably by bad effects. Bard and Turiel (Evangeline Lilly) are also hit pretty hard by this. Only Thranduil (Lee Pace) manages to have a really cool, really short badass moment and even then it is more of the spinning nonsense that we see pretty much everyone do.

Just when I had completely given up on the movie, however, it manages to pull out some very cool and emotionally resonant moments in it’s final confrontations. These moments are worth a lot and even if they still have things in there you see coming from a mile away, they remind you that somewhere in there is a director who is very talented and has, in the past, given a shit.

The performances are very good here with everyone putting in the quality of work that we’ve come to expect from them. Richard Armitage handles Thorin’s growing madness perfectly while Martin Freeman continues to be the perfect Bilbo. I am very fond of Luke Evans and he does a great job here in particular and Ian McKellen is as good as ever as Gandalf. With a cast this size I am not naming everyone but there were no sour notes here on the performance side at all.

Battle of the Five Armies feels really rushed and ultimately feels empty and plodding. The previous two films defied expectation by being worthwhile even with the stretches made to the material but this film just can’t keep it up. There isn’t enough here to go on and the battle itself, which should have been cool is mind-numbingly repetitive. Just by way of balance, the titular battle takes up a paragraph of the book told after the fact. This movie feels like not only did they run out of source material but also of ideas.

Conclusion [5.5 out of 10]

I didn’t hate the Battle of the Five Armies but I was majorly disappointed and the more I have thought about it since the more I dislike it. There are flashes of good material here and the character work is often worthwhile but there just isn’t enough of anything compelling to keep interest. If the technical aspects had been good and able to thrill then it might have gotten away with it but as it is the Battle of the Five Armies is downright bad in that department and all you are left with are a handful of moments in a sea of disappointment.