The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (2013)
★★★ — The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (2013)
Smaug is magnificent. That's the thing I keep coming back to. Whoever decided to cast Benedict Cumberbatch and let him purr and slither through every line deserves a raise, because that dragon is genuinely one of the best screen villains of the decade. The Lonely Mountain sequence, all that cavernous golden darkness and the sheer scale of the beast, is worth the price of admission on its own. I sat there with my popcorn completely forgetting to eat it, which is high praise from me.
The trouble is, The Desolation of Smaug knows it has a trump card in Smaug, and so it makes you wait. And wait. And then wait a bit longer. It's a rich, overstuffed meal, brilliant in individual bites, but by the time you've cleared the plate you're lying on the sofa wondering why you did that to yourself.
Peter Jackson can still stage a chase like few directors working today. The barrel escape sequence down the river is completely ludicrous, defying gravity, physics, and probably several elvish health and safety regulations, but it's an absolute blast. I was grinning like an idiot. The film's action set pieces have that same kinetic energy Jackson brought to The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, that sense of controlled chaos where you're always just about following the geography of a scene even when it's going completely mad.
But then there's the romance. Oh, the romance. Look, I've got nothing against expanding Tolkien's source material when it serves the story. Bringing in White Council business, fleshing out the dwarves, fine. But the Tauriel subplot, and whatever is going on between her and whichever dwarf it is (I genuinely cannot tell Fili and Kili apart under all that hair, and the film doesn't try very hard to help), feels like someone in a studio meeting scribbled "add YA love triangle" on a napkin and nobody had the nerve to bin it. It's tonally jarring. The Hobbit is supposed to be a cosier, more intimate adventure than the Lord of the Rings trilogy. It's about a small, comfort-loving creature being pushed out of his front door and discovering something in himself. Angsty elf-dwarf longing doesn't belong in that story. It belongs in a different franchise entirely.
And Legolas. He's here. He does things. His presence is explained by the fact that we're in Mirkwood and his dad runs the place, but his every appearance feels less like storytelling and more like a studio winking at the audience. I didn't mind it as much as some people did, but I'd be lying if I said it felt organic rather than like pure fan service dressed up in a quiver.
The bigger issue is structural. Tolkien's middle chapter is not a sprawling, multi-stranded epic. It's a journey with a destination. Jackson stretches every sequence past the point where it's earned its running time, and the film starts to feel padded not by substance but by spectacle. More chases following chases. More CGI armies doing CGI things. It's beautiful, often genuinely breathtaking, but it's also exhausting in a way that the first film managed to mostly avoid through sheer charm and novelty.
What gets lost in all the bombast is Bilbo. Martin Freeman is doing lovely, precise work here and the film keeps sidelining him for dwarf politics and elvish romance. That's the cosy heart of The Hobbit, and this trilogy keeps forgetting it's there.
Three stars. Smaug earns every one of them on his own. The love subplot and the endless padding nick the other two. There's a genuinely great film somewhere inside this one, and I suspect it's about ninety minutes long. What we've got instead is spectacular, occasionally brilliant, and deeply inconsistent. Worth watching for the dragon alone. Just let Thranduil's extraordinary eyebrows carry you through the slower stretches. They're doing more dramatic work than the script deserves.
Rating: ★★★ | Year: 2013 | Watched: 2025-06-05
Where to watch
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Related on Movies With Macca
More from Peter Jackson: King Kong (2005) · The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (2014) · The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012) · The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)
More with Ian McKellen: The Da Vinci Code (2006) · X-Men: The Last Stand (2006) · X2 (2003) · The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (2014)
More from New Zealand: What We Do in the Shadows (2014) · Mortal Engines (2018) · King Kong (2005) · 'Aho'eitu (2015)
More from the 2010s: Wonder (2017) · Beautiful Boy (2018) · The Witch (2015) · What We Do in the Shadows (2014)
More fantasy: Viy (1967) · Alice in Wonderland (1951) · Mononoke the Movie: The Phantom in the Rain (2024) · Mononoke the Movie: Chapter II - The Ashes of Rage (2025)
More adventure: Alice in Wonderland (1951) · The Eagle (1925) · Louisiana Story (1948) · The General (1926)
