The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug
The less said about last year’s be-careful-what-you-wish-for The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, the better. To note that the first of the three serialized installments lacked Peter Jackson’s Middle Earth magic would be akin to observing that Gollum is somewhat preoccupied.
Thankfully, the second part of Jackson’s newer J.R.R. Tolkien trilogy — titled The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, much to the consternation of theater-marquee letterers everywhere — substantially ups the quality and the stakes. This middle portion of Bilbo and Gandalf’s Excellent Adventure is still larded with excess narrative baggage, gratuitous appearances by fan favorites and the occasional dead weight. (As with Journey, it’s also being shown in a higher-frame-rate option, a techno-whiz move that renders everything with the retina-frying “clarity” of an enormous Teletubbies episode. Seek out the more traditional version for maximum escapist immersion.) But it’s not turgid this time around, which immediately makes it a vast improvement.
In fact, thanks to a prologue that gives the characters’ trek to Lonely Mountain a greater thematic sense of purpose, there’s an urgency here that propels things along with much more momentum. Giant spiders, skin-changers and shrieking brutes provide obstacles to be overcome and chances for gory beheadings, notably once Orlando Bloom’s Legolas starts using orc corpses as skateboards. This is the Jackson we’ve missed — the guy who never met a rotating Dutch-angle shot or sweeping landscape vista he didn’t like.
Having honed a set of comic tics and tricks over years on such shows as The Office and the BBC’s Sherlock, Martin Freeman at first turned Bilbo into another example of charming, stammering Freemasonry, giving us a hobbit who seemed like he was punching the clock at a paper company even when he was outsmarting trolls. But he has grown into the role and now appears to be embracing his inner Baggins instead of grafting his usual persona onto the character. His reading of “Mine!” when a beasty tries to nab his precious ring makes the scene the single most meta-interesting moment in the film. “You’re not the same hobbit who left the shire,” Gandalf muses, and Ian McKellen could well be talking to his fellow actor. You get giddy wondering what he’s got up his puffy sleeve for the last movie.
Then again, most of The Desolation of Smaug seems to be gearing up for that final chapter, even when the titular dragon (voiced by Freeman’s Sherlock partner, Benedict Cumberbatch) starts wreaking havoc and slithering after our band of Middle Earth brothers in literal hot pursuit.
Improvement or not, the film still suffers from middle-movie syndrome, diligently moving everything into place for the big blowout. Characters are left in peril, orcs and wargs are on the move, and sheer anarchy is loosed upon the world. No one is expecting something as awe-inspiring as The Two Towers‘ Battle of Helm’s Deep, the showstopper that graced Jackson’s Lord of the Rings second act, but the sense that time and baddies are being killed in equal measure here keeps this from being a stand-alone victory. Jackson may have dug himself out of the hobbit hole he was in, but there are still miles to go before Bilbo and company sleep. At least now we, too, feel compelled to stay awake.
