Director: Peter Jackson
Starring: Martin Freeman, Orlando Bloom, Ian McKellen, Richard Armitage
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Peter Jackson’s second instalment of his three-part adaptation of J R R Tolkien’s The Hobbit takes us, once again, to Middle Earth. Depending on your feelings towards part one, An Unexpected Journey, you may or may not be jumping for joy. After all, following his universally acclaimed take on Tolkien’s epic fantasy The Lord of the Rings, this prequel’s first episode left critics and audiences divided.
Problems ranged from the ponderous three-hour running time (covering just a third of a 300-odd page book) to the 48 frames-per-second filming technique, which lent the footage a bizarre over-lit quality. So you can’t help but feel that Jackson has something to prove with this second part. Either way, he knocks it out the park – delivering a film brimming with action, high adventure and excitement.
With the running time trimmed down to 161 minutes, it doesn’t suffer from any of the issues of its predecessor, partly because we dive right into the narrative, with The Hobbit hero Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman) and his posse of 13 dwarves already on their way to the Lonely Mountain to confront the fire-breathing dragon, Smaug.
Within the first 20-odd minutes, the gang are wandering into Mirkwood forest, with its population of man-sized, venomous spiders. If you thought the sequence in Rings’ middle chapter, The Two Towers, was scary – when Frodo encounters a giant arachnid – this scene easily outstrips that. Making full use of 3-D with fanged, creepy-crawlies jumping out at you, it’ll leave anyone with a fear of spiders suffering nightmares for days.
Partly, this latest episode benefits from the introduction of some old friends – the elf archer Legolas (Orlando Bloom), whose return to the story gives it a much-needed swashbuckling verve. He arrives with a new character in the story, fellow elf Tauriel (Lost’s Evangeline Lilly), who is just as adept with a bow-and-arrow. Lilly is superb, not least in helping to redress the male-female imbalance that dominates Tolkien’s universe.
There’s another worthy addition in Bard the Bowman (Luke Evans), the brave family man who smuggles Bilbo and the dwarves into Lake-town, which stands in the shadows of the Lonely Mountain and was once ruined by Smaug. Evans has an old-fashioned movie star quality about him. And together with the growing dominance of Richard Armitage, as the dwarves’ self-styled leader Thorin Oakenshield, the heroic qualities brought to Rings by Viggo Mortensen’s Aragorn aren’t missed.
If there’s a disappointment in this episode, it’s that Ian McKellen’s Gandalf is sidelined – although he does get one major confrontation that should have fans drooling. Then there’s Smaug, the digital dragon whose movements and voice are provided by Benedict Cumberbatch. The Bilbo/Smaug scenes don’t quite ignite, but then, we still have one more movie to come. Jackson, it seems, is saving the best for last.
• The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug opens on December 12
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