I will promise you something about my review that director Peter Jackson could not: I will not make this a rambling, incomprehensible, bloated, unnecessary piece on the Hobbit…okay I’m going to try my damndest not to.

So here we are, after two overly long, dragged out films we have reached the climax of the original book by JRR Tolkien. A portion of the book that was maybe the last 15% of the story and yet here has to serve as the last third to an already long adaptation of the original source. Not going to even try giving you a plot synopsis here since if you haven’t seen the earlier two films (or even the 1977 animated movie), you will be absolutely lost as to what the hell is going on.

Let’s just say that the leader of a pack of dwarves, Thorin, is being a greedy bastard driven insane by his lust for all that is shiny and gold now that the dragon who stole it from him years ago is dead. This leads to an all out battle between the dwarves, the humans who had their homes destroyed by said dragon until one of them slayed it, and the elves who also want some diamonds in the innumerable wealth Thorin now possesses. Course this goes to shit when a fourth army arrives in the form of a legion of ugly ass orcs who want to use the location for…you know what? Fuck it.

I’ve realized that I’m rambling in trying to tell this freaking story…WHEN IT DIDN’T HAVE TO BE THIS WAY. Jesus Tapdancing Christ, the original story is a short, pedantic Hobbit gets recruited to steal some gold from a dragon and gets into a five way battle by the end of it. That’s it. There’s no reason for this shit to have been three bloody movies.

Course that’s not the only thing going on since you have a lot of set up for the Lord of the Rings trilogy going on as well. This crap wasn’t even in the original book and as far as I know wasn’t in the books of the Lord of the Rings either. But all of this is just excess fat that has nothing to do with the gold plot line.

Worst of all, while I sat through a 140 minutes, I was shocked to learn that the original edit of this movie is 220 minutes bloody long! So you have characters dropping in and out almost at random with character subplots introduced and dropped almost immediately.

This crap didn’t happen in the original Lord of the Rings trilogy as each of the three subplots going on in the film all related to a war between the good guys and the bad guys. It was simpler and tighter. Qualities that these Hobbit movies completely fail to have.

Before I drive the last stake through the heart of this mess, I will freely admit that every single actor gives it their all in these movies. They all took their jobs seriously as did the stunt men and women pulling off very interesting action sequences.

But here’s the killing blow children: these films have consequence free action in them. In the end, I didn’t care what happened to any of these characters since I couldn’t follow their stories closely enough to enjoy and develop an emotional connection with as I did with the original trilogy. Ultimately the action reminded me of the Transformers movies in the worse way: extravagant, unnecessary, drawn out fight scenes that ring hollow when all is said and done.

The tragic stupidity of all this is that Peter Jackson has captured the look, feel, and tone of that original story across these movies. There just not connected well at all because of all the extraneous bullshit in between. These films will easily become pet projects for fans and film editors to cut these three movies down to a single three hour film. I promise you, it can be done. We only have to wait for the release of the Blu-ray before these people can get to work on this effort. I’ve got the perfect title for it all = The Hobbit: There and Back Again.

So given that stance, I am giving this movie and it’s predecessors a low…

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