Genre Action

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (2014)

Item: The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies
Rating: 2.0
Author: Ross McLaren

★★ — The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (2014)

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies arrived in cinemas in December 2014 as the third and final chapter of Peter Jackson's adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's 1937 novel. Where the source material is a relatively slim children's book, Jackson and his co-writers had already stretched the story across two films before this closing instalment, meaning The Battle of the Five Armies was always going to carry a particular burden: justifying its own existence. The film picks up immediately where The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug left off, with the dragon Smaug unleashed on the people of Laketown, before pivoting to the conflict over Erebor's hoard that gives the film its title. Notably, Tolkien's original text dispatches the battle almost entirely off-page, a creative decision that would turn out to be rather pointed in retrospect.

Jackson had, of course, proved he could handle both intimate storytelling and large-scale warfare across his earlier Middle-earth work, most memorably in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. The Hobbit trilogy was produced by New Line Cinema and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer through Jackson's own WingNut Films, the same banner behind his long career in New Zealand. The production was, by any measure, a colossal undertaking, one that had famously changed directors mid-development before Jackson stepped back in. Whether the resulting films bear the marks of that turbulent gestation is a question the finished trilogy raises fairly insistently. At 144 minutes, this final chapter is actually the shortest of the three, which is a sentence that tells its own story.

The cast assembled here is, on paper, formidable. Ian McKellen returns as Gandalf, a role he has inhabited with such ease across six films (including, away from Middle-earth, his long-running work in the X-Men franchise, as seen in X2) that he can sell almost any material. Martin Freeman's Bilbo Baggins remains the emotional anchor of the trilogy, a performance built on restraint and flickers of dry wit. Richard Armitage brings considerable weight to Thorin Oakenshield's increasingly complicated arc, and Orlando Bloom and Evangeline Lilly reprise their roles as Legolas and Tauriel. The returning cast is polished but the material they are given here is, depending on your patience, variable to say the least. Howard Shore, as ever, provides the score.

After the highs of An Unexpected Journey and the messy middle of Desolation, this “finale” feels less like an epic conclusion and more like a studio exec scribbling “ADD MORE EXPLOSIONS” in red ink over Tolkien’s original third act. The problem is it’s just boring . Bilbo’s sidelined, the titular battle is a muddy blur of CGI armies, and Azog’s relentless cameo turns him into the Duracell bunny of Middle-earth. Why is he even here? Smaug’s dead! Let the dwarves sort their gold. Instead, we get Azog riding a white warg like he’s auditioning for Game of Thrones, while Legolas does parkour over corpses. It’s less “epic clash of civilizations” and more “let’s throw every budget leftover at the screen.” Tolkien’s original skipped the battle because Bilbo was knocked out. Smart move. Jackson fills the gap with… more Azog, more dwarves arguing about treasure, and a romance subplot (still?) that fizzles before it starts. The emotional core (the cost of greed, Bilbo’s quiet heroism) is buried under collapsing stone bridges and elf-dwarf drama. And when Bilbo finally wakes up, it’s all “Oh hey, Gandalf’s back!” as if we weren’t just watching a two-hour filler episode. It’s not all bad (Smaug’s death scene still slaps), and Howard Shore’s score swells with melancholy for the Shire’s farewell. But this isn’t The Hobbit anymore. It’s The Hobbit: Now with 400% more hollywood. A real shame.

For me, that final point about Shore's score is worth sitting with a moment. There is genuine feeling in the music even when the film around it is struggling to locate any. The farewell to the Shire motif carries real weight, and it is a little sad that it is deployed in service of a film that has so thoroughly lost the thread of what made Bilbo's story worth telling in the first place. I keep coming back to the original trilogy and wondering what Jackson might have done with this same material had the pressure to fill three films not been there. Compared to something like An Unexpected Journey, which at least had the charm of starting something, this closer has the unenviable job of landing a plane that ran out of runway about forty minutes in. A trilogy that began with so much promise deserved a better send-off than this.

Rating: ★★ | Year: 2014 | Watched: 2025-06-05

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Trailer

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