Short Round: The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (2013) ***/*****
Seeing as The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug is the fifth of six planned movies director Peter Jackson is making that are set in fantasy author JRR Tolkien’s Middle Earth, it’s becoming progressively less necessary to discuss them at length. You already know the tone Jackson is striking with this series, you already know the characters and the actors who are portraying them, and you probably also already know whether this is a series you’re continuing with or whether it’s one you decided to drop long ago. Really, at this point, the only thing interesting to talk about is the few ways in which each movie differs from the ones that came before it. So, let’s go ahead and do that.
The first Hobbit film, An Unexpected Journey, differed from Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy in that it traded in quite a bit of its practical effects work for more strictly-CG visuals, and it seemed like a cartoonier approach to the world’s fighting and physics came with the switch. People didn’t like this change, and it’s one that continues here. That first Hobbit film also differed from the Lord of the Rings movies in that Bilbo and his band of Dwarves made for a livelier crew of protagonists than Frodo and his fellow Hobbits, but largely that seemed to be a change that went unappreciated. Unappreciated as it may have been there, it’s a change that’s continued here, and it’s once again a welcome one.
A key way that The Desolation of Smaug differs from An Unexpected Journey is that it’s a much more even film than the first, which consisted of a series of high highs and low lows. Strangely though, that consistency has resulted in a less interesting movie, because while An Unexpected Journey had a miserable first act, the action scenes later on were so fun that they more than made up for the slow start. Here nothing is too bad, but the action scenes that make up the heart of the film (particularly a battle that wages down a raging river and the confrontation with Smaug) are just so cartoony, fake-looking, and downright ridiculous that they don’t ever really play as high points. Ultimately, Desolation of Smaug is a perfectly watchable adventure movie, though one that doesn’t come close to matching the best work of Jackson’s first trilogy. The only reason for anyone who is on the fence to maybe give this one a try is to see Smaug, who’s genuinely impressive in his effects work and who is lent quite a bit of personality thanks to his being voiced by that charming rogue Benedict Cumberbatch. Oh, and little girls might also like to see Evangeline Lilly’s female elf archer, Tauriel, because female archers seem to be the sort of thing people are really into at the moment.
