Cinemavenger

   The funniest, nastiest movie reviews anywhere.

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies

Despite having lost a Balrog's worth of weight since his Dead Alive days, Peter Jackson must still have Godzilla-sized balls. 

Here's a guy who turned a one-day-read novel into a nearly eight-hour movie trilogy (at least 10 or 11 hours in "director's cut" form - count on it)  so that Warner Bros. could triple its profits on what should have been a single film (and was - save yourself an assload of time and check out the superior 1977 Rankin-Bass animated flick that tells the tale of The Hobbit with a ton more heart in a mere 90 minutes) yet he doesn't hesitate for a second to make the "big message" of The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies the Nodrog Okkeg maxim, "Greed is bad."  At one point he even has Gandalf portentously declare, "Don't underestimate the evil of gold."

Look out!  Peter Jackson's ballsack is about to level Tokyo!

The runner up for this week's Biggest Balls Award goes to North Korea for holding up a paper "hacker" mask in front of its face and threatening to blow up any theater that dared to show The Interview this week then peeking around the mask with a shit-eating grin and offering to help the U.S. government track down the wascally hackers who made the threat.  He may not have fuel to heat his people's homes, food to put on their tables or the ability to reach the medicine cabinet without a step stool, but Kim Jong Un has got him some cojones grandes.

And, of course, this week's Wee Little Can Hardly Call Them Balls Award goes to Sony for caving like a world-class spelunker and refusing to release The Interview as planned in the face of North Korea's threats.  Looks like Japanese nards have shriveled more than a trifle since December 7, 1941.

As for The Hobbit 3 in 3D, what can you say?  It kills off its second best character, the dragon Smaug (voice of Benedict Cumberbatch), before the title card hits the screen.  It leaves Gandalf (Ian McKellen) in a gibbet for the first hour or so.  It has Thorin the Dwarf King (Richard Armitage) go from noble to douchebag for no good reason then, after a completely random, badly-filmed bad trip, suddenly return to nobility . . . exactly 30 minutes too late to keep the humans, elves and dwarfs from fighting amongst themselves rather than banding together and crushing the Nazis, er, Orcs.

It has Orc Goering, Azog (Manu Bennett), upgrade from a large salad fork to a Mordor-style bat'leth sticking out of his stump as he goes all Paul Atreides with some giant Dune worms.  And it features an hour of battle and a dozen decapitations without showing so much as a thimbleful of blood.

Worst of all, it takes its best character, Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman), you know, THE FUCKING "HOBBIT" FROM THE FUCKING TITLE, and completely sidelines him.  He's in the movie for about 15 minutes, swear to Sauron.  Freeman still offers up the only vaguely enjoyable moments in TH:TBOTFA . . . all three of them.

With Middle Earth presumably behind him, Jackson can set his sights on dominating the 2015-2018 Xmas box office with his $1B, star-studded, four-movie adaptation of The Velveteen Rabbit. 

December 21, 2014