Review: The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies

City Paper grade: C+

Peter Jackson finally takes his leave (fingers crossed) of Tolkien’s world with about as satisfying a conclusion as one could hope for from his problematic second trilogy. At a relatively concise two-and-a-half hours, The Battle of the Five Armies is the most focused but least involving installment of Jackson’s Hobbit adaptation. That’s because even after spending more than six hours trekking across Middle Earth, Jackson has never managed to differentiate most of his band of dwarves from one another, so when some of our heroes fall in battle, it hardly registers. The characters that we do care about — Martin Freeman’s Bilbo and Ian McKellen’s Gandalf — are largely reduced to onlookers, popping up occasionally to express concern and then disappearing again. The professed mission of the trilogy, to vanquish the dragon Smaug and reclaim the dwarves’ lost kingdom, is accomplished before the film’s subtitle appears, leaving Richard Armitage’s gold-crazy king and Luke Evans’ not-quite-Aragorn Bard to become its hollow center. Jackson is adept at balancing the epic and the intimate, so the film’s centerpiece, the 45-minute battle sequence, is expertly executed, albeit with little at stake for audiences who have stuck it out this long. It all feels too much like an afterthought, the final consequence of the director’s much-derided decision to pad Tolkien’s slim novel into a bloated trilogy and to uncomfortably overlay The Lord of the Rings’ darker tone over its lighthearted predecessor. Gandalf’s superfluous subplot, meant to set the events of the Rings trilogy in motion, remains superfluous to its conclusion, and Jackson riddles the final moments with hints of things to come that we finished watching a decade ago.