Tag: Richard Armitage

Film Review: The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies

H-O-B-B-I-T! Fight! Fight! Fight!…and joke…and Fight! Fight! Fight!…and joke…

Thorin (Richard Armitage) and Bilbo (Martin Freeman) size each other up.
Thorin (Richard Armitage) and Bilbo (Martin Freeman) size each other up.

Let’s get this out of the way — The Hobbit should’ve been 1-2 movies, not 3.  Most of us came to terms with this years ago.  That’s a conversation for a another time, however.  For now, let’s concentrate on the third and final installment of The Hobbit trilogy, and the final chapter (without debate) of Peter Jackson’s exploration of Middle Earth.  The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (HTBotFA) is not the best of the trilogy – it trails HTDoS (The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug) but is a bit ahead of HAUJ (The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey).  While the middle chapter had some interesting character transitions, HTBotFA has very little substance outside the constant fighting taking place.  We’ve seen better battles before, so the ones featured here seem tired and stale, and therefore overwrought with unique creature designs to help grasp for freshness.  And once again, it’s an exciting but sometimes silly feast of CGI, the kind that makes you miss the hillside skirmish in Fellowship of the Ring or even the large battle at the end of The Return of the King, which featured a lot of actual actors in costumes.  Here, it’s commonly 1-2 actors versus scores of CGI creatures.  It’s just not as thrilling.  And so the newest Hobbit film is a tired, ultra climactic end to a superfluously extended journey which was generally fun to watch, yet constantly played second fiddle to the far superior LotR trilogy.

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Film Review: Into the Storm

An unnatural disaster.

Should we stay or should we go? It's just so pretty and destructive!
Should we stay or should we leave…the theater.

Into the Storm is one of those movies in which you can easily tell how most of, if not all, the budget was spent.  The tornado sequences look great.  There’s a lot of debris flying around, making a mess.  I’m sure that if I were to compare the destructive tornadoes in 1996’s Twister to those in Into the Storm, the latter would make the former look silly and cartoonish. But taken in its entirety, Into the Storm makes Twister look like a masterpiece (my apologies to those who were of this opinion of Twister already).  Into the Storm, aside from a few intense in-the-thick-of-it moments, completely misses the mark.  A weak story, awkward acting, and makeshift dialogue derail Into the Storm, and even the tornadoes are welcome interruptions from the sloppy storyline, rather than harbingers of impending doom.

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