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There is one thrilling, rib-tickling sequence in The Hobbit: The Desolation of
Smaug: A group of dwarves, riding inside empty wine barrels over rushing rapids
and waterfalls, fends off an attack by an army of orcs with the help of
bow-and-arrow-wielding elves. The set-piece is as fun and rousing as anything in
Steven Spielberg’s canon. Indeed, it's cribbed from Spielberg's Adventures Of
Tin Tin. The action is sprawling and comes at you from all angles — there’s so
much happening, your eyes don’t know where to look — and director Peter Jackson
throws in some terrific slapstick as a bonus, leavening the furious excitement
with laughs. It’s a showstopper. But another part of what makes the sequence so
memorable is that it also advances the story: It matters. The same cannot be
said for the bulk of Smaug, a bloated, dawdling and distended adventure that
throws in so many extraneous characters and subplots, the eponymous hero — Bilbo
Baggins — is edged off the screen for large chunks of time. When Jackson
announced he was going to adapt Tolkien’s 300-page novel into three films
instead of the originally announced two, fans grumbled about studio greed and
artistic indulgence. The now-infamous 30-minute dinner scene that opened the
previous film, An Unexpected Journey, seemed to confirm those suspicions (early
in Smaug, when the dwarves sat down for a meal, I gripped my armrests and braced
for the worst, but fortunately it turned out to just be a snack).
With Smaug, Jackson opens up the story in an attempt to create a bigger
universe, much like he did with The Lord of the Rings trilogy, but the tale is
too slight to support the added weight, and the focus and impetus are lost. Why
do we have to spend so much time with the pouty elven king Thranduil (Lee Pace)
warning his son and heir Legolas (Orlando Bloom) not to fall for the beautiful
Tauriel (Evangeline Lilly, playing a character that never existed in the books),
because she’s not worthy of the throne? Why do we have to endure Tauriel’s
torment over being torn between duty to her tribe and her love for one of the
dwarves, Kili (Aidan Turner), who conveniently happens to be unusually tall and
handsome for his kind? Why does Gandalf have to exit the film at midpoint to
face off against Sauron, when we already know how all that business turns out? I
appreciated the detail and sense of community that Jackson puts into his
depiction of Lake-town, a port city in which a widowed smuggler (Luke Evans)
plays an important role in the dwarves’ quest (the city itself will be a major
part of the third film). But did we really have to spend that long meeting all
the denizens and their children?
And then there’s the chatty dragon situation. The Desolation of Smaug builds and
builds to a confrontation between the heroes and the enormous fire-breathing
beast, which sleeps on mountains of gold coins and jewels and treasure. As
usual, Jackson doesn’t disappoint on a visual level — the dragon looks wonderful
— but Smaug likes the sound of its own voice .
Acted by Benedict Cumberbatch, Smaug talks and talks and talks and talks — he’s
like all the James Bond and Dr. Evil villains rolled into one — and despite its
impossible size and fearsome appearance, the dragon is never all that scary. The
wonderful interaction between Bilbo and Smaug from the book is lost in the
cavernous halls of the lost Dwarf Kingdom of Erebor. The book was all about this
moment, but in the course this convoluted film series, Smaug is an afterthought,
reduced to competing for screen time with an army of characters expanded to
include the return of Sauron and his ferocious legion of orcs. Whenever the
movie gives him some screen time, Freeman does well depicting Bilbo’s growing
dependence on the magical ring he stole from Gollum — it’s like a drug — and
he’s good, too, at portraying the timid hobbit’s burgeoning bravery and courage
(he gets to save the day, more than once).
But Jackson has become too distracted by his digital toys to give his characters
the same weight and importance he used in the Rings trilogy (Bloom, for one,
comes off as stiff and robotic, even though he’s reprising the signature role
that made him famous). The Desolation of Smaug is all about finely rendered CGI
creatures (including giant orcs and an enormous bear-monster), villages that
feel like sets augmented by special effects and a visual grandeur that is at
odds with the intimacy of this small, simple tale. Once again, Jackson meanders
from one plot crisis to the next, with helicopter shots of bucolic New Zealand
as the bridge between the chaos. It’s such a predictable rhythm, that it begs a
drinking game: Chug a beer every time the film turns into a tourist booster for
New Zealand travel.
Saying a movie looks like a video game has become a hoary cliche, but that’s
really the best way to describe long chunks of Smaug, which uses so much
animation it practically qualifies as a Pixar movie. And although the movie ends
on an enormous, groan-inducing cliffhanger, this story has been stretched so
thin that all the suspense has seeped out of it. People who haven’t read the
book will have to wait until next December to find out how Bilbo and his gang
fares. But it’s hard to imagine anyone fretting much until the third film
arrives.
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