With the introductions and bag-packing out of the way from the first film, the new movie jumps straight into the action and doesn't relent until the cliffhanger ending almost three hours later.
The most fun part of the film comes as the dwarves flee the elven holding block in oak kegs and shoot down whitewater rapids through a gauntlet of orcs.
If you are content to spend as much time in Middle Earth as possible, you'll have plenty of fun with this year's installment. But if you're a stickler for literary accuracy and pacing, the offering may prove only slightly less frustrating.
I'm not an aficionado of J.R.R. Tolkien's wonderworlds and I was bored with the first Hobbit movie. All this is by way of saying I quite liked its sequel and the second in the trilogy.
Yes, this is evolution in the right direction, but now it's time to take that energy and give us a final chapter that will move and inspire as well as dazzle.
The tale has no emotional resonance, and the thinness of the plot (only five of the book's chapters are adapted here) and the colorless depictions of the leading characters do it no favors.
