Outside of that context and taken on its own merits, Jackson’s third Hobbit film works reasonably well in bringing the story to a satisfying conclusion while also delivering a cavalcade of action sequences that, unlike some of the action in the earlier films, is narratively justified and effectively rendered. The title of the film, after all, is The Battle of the Five Armies, and said battle dominates the majority of the film. It begins, however, by picking up on the cliffhanger that ended The Desolation of Smaug (2013), with the baritone-voiced dragon leaving the Misty Mountain and heading toward Lake Town, which he proceeds to destroy with all the fiery intensity we would expect before being taken down by Bard (Luke Evans), who exploits the one weakness in his otherwise impenetrable scaly skin. The death of Smaug also features one of Jackson’s more emotionally compelling additions to Tolkien’s work, as he stages the climactic arrow release by having Bard use his young son as support, telling the terrified boy to look him in the eyes as they both face certain death. It’s a reminder of just how good Jackson can be when he’s on his game.

Nothing else in the rest of the film quite matches the emotional and visual intensity of that moment, although that doesn’t mean that Jackson doesn’t give it his all. Once Smaug is killed (I’d say “spoiler alert, but it happens in the first 20 minutes), the story centers on the tensions among dwarves, elves, and men over the massive treasure that Smaug has been hoarding for generations. The treasure technically belongs to the dwarves, but both the elves and the men of Lake Town have genuine arguments for why they deserve at least a portion of the fortune. Unfortunately, dwarf king Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage), who led the reclamation effort along with 12 of his dwarf compatriots, the wizard Gandalf (Ian McKellan), and the hobbit Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman), becomes obsessed with the treasure (“dragonsick,” in the story’s parlance) and refuses to allow anyone to share in it. This leads to a protracted stand-off that Bilbo tries to alleviate by using the much prized arkenstone, the greatest treasure within the treasure, as leverage, but to no avail. When a movie has the word “battle” in the title, there’s going to be an armed throwdown at some point.

And so the second half of the film is given over to the massive battle that ensues when the men of Lake Town and the elves lay siege to the dwarf stronghold, only to join together after the arrival of a massive army of orcs intent on taking the treasure for themselves. Jackson has staged a lot of battles in Middle-earth by this point, and you can sense his desire to exceed all of them here—one battlefield, five armies, so many different ways to die. The computer software used to render marching hoards has only improved since the early 2000s when Jackson first dared to do the unthinkable by adapting Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy into live-action films, and The Battle of the Five Armies is replete with aerial shots of thousands upon thousands of figures marching in stride, lining up, and then going to battle. At times the sense of scale becomes too much, as the constant bird’s eye views threaten to diminish the intensity of the violence, but Jackson always brings us back into the midst of the battle, giving us a series of individualized stand-offs that are ultimately much more engaging and tense that the hoards hacking at each other. Best of these is the battle between Thorin and the gnarled orc leader, which takes place on an ice-covered river at the edge of a frozen waterfall. The showiest of the battles involves the elves Legolas (Orlando Bloom) and Tauriel (Evangeline Lilly) taking on another orc in a crumbling tower wedged between two mountaintops.

The film’s weaknesses lie primarily in the spots where Jackson and co-screenwriters Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, and Guillermo del Toro tried to expand on Tolkien’s original narrative, including a scene in which Gandalf is freed from imprisonment by the timely arrival of Galadriel (Cate Blanchett), Saruman (Christopher Lee), and Elrond (Hugo Weaving), familiar faces from The Lord of the Rings who appear nowhere in Tolkien’s book. Of course, the largely uninteresting love triangle among Tauriel, Legolas, and the dwarf Kili (Aidan Turner) has to be brought to some kind of conclusion, and however tragically it is meant to play, it feels like exactly what it is: a sop to the teenage girls who made the Twilight series such a massive hit. The idea in and of itself isn’t necessarily bad, but it’s delivered with such perfunctory blah-ness that it feels even more derivative than it actually is. My guess is that Jackson’s heart was never really in it.

And, as with the previous two Hobbit films, The Battle of the Five Armies gets much of its heart from the excellent performance by Martin Freeman as Bilbo Baggins. Freeman brings a sense of warmth and humor and humanity to the role, although his effectiveness here is somewhat diminished by the fact that he is frequently sidelined by all the other subplots coming to a head. Yet, when all of that is done, it is with him that the film ends, and he (and Ian Holm as his older self) remind us that what we really love about Jackson’s Tolkien adaptations are the characters, which is why so many imitators have failed to capture their magic. All the sorcery and sword-swinging and fire-breathing in the world can never replace the intensity of a good character well played, and even though Jackson has lost sight of that from time to time, his sympathetic hobbit protagonist, who has genuinely grown in his trip “there and back again,” keeps the film just grounded enough to work as more than simple spectacle.

Copyright ©2014 James Kendrick

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