The Hobbit Films Aren't Indulgent Messes -- They're Generous

Another reason reviewing these movies is a mug's game: At theatrical release, the damn movies aren't finished yet. The Blu-ray of The Desolation of Smaug adds 25 minutes to the original 161-minute running time, and as is the case with Jackson's Lord of the Rings films, that extra breathing room seems to speed things up. Those new scenes often improve the scenes around them: In the extended cut, the travails of the dwarves in Laketown don't feel like mere time-killing. Stephen Fry eats a plate of bollocks, and you get to stare at those sets: Lakewood's shanties and canals out-brine Sweethaven from Altman's Popeye. The company's march into the sumptuously wicked forest of Mirkwood is now at least five minutes longer, and it's surprising how effective, dreamlike, disorienting the sequence is — how could this have been cut? It would be the single best bit in any other director's fantasy extravaganza, but Jackson's got surplus barrels full of such stuff, heaps more than a true studio filmmaker would ever bother with. Is it indulgent to craft and film reams of material that fans want to see?

A throwaway scene in the theatrical of Gandalf stalking through a haunted ruin here swells into a set piece, with a mad-dwarf attack and a peek-a-boo foot chase through skull-lined tunnels. Mikael Persbrandt's were-dude Beorn -- so slight a presence in the regular cut that I forgot he was in it at all -- here gets a memorable comedy sequence, one that finally makes him credible as friend and foe. There's even a couple more moments that allow Martin Freeman to Bilbo it up -- his hobbit is a plucky priss slowly becoming something like a heroic addict, and his performance seems more marvelous here even than it did on the big screen. Bilbo evinces something nobody else does in Middle-earth, something that I suspect the most ardent fans count on the films to escape from: self-consciousness. He's the first person in a Jackson fantasy since Michael J. Fox in The Frighteners ever to acknowledge the silliness around him. At the same time, Freeman is fully committed to the films' (sometimes weak) emotional beats, turning hogwash into recognizable human -- or humanoid -- feeling.

Just enjoy the time with Bilbo.

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It's nice to have a guide like Freeman for these sprawling, inelegant, endlessly giving features, even if he gets lost in some of those consummate beat-'em-ups. Especially in their final form, the Hobbit movies take up an afternoon the way a TV broadcast of The Ten Commandments or The 7th Voyage of Sinbad once did. The good parts are just as good, although different audiences will disagree on what those good parts are. Give me the dragon (best ever in a movie!), the mountains, the magic woods, the quick sequence where Gandalf spelunks into a trapped tomb. As for that moment where the dwarves try to drown that dragon in what looks like popcorn butter? Or when the elf-guard and the hunky he-dwarf start making eyes and talking about the moonlight? Think of them as being like the commercials everyone used to put up with.