There and back again...and again

With the holidays in full swing, what better way to escape Perth’s latest heatwave than with a fun packed family outing to a nice air conditioned cinema? And with my entire clan all fully paid up members of the Mr Tolkien franchise fan club, it seemed we had little choice but to check out the latest Middle Earth blockbuster.

Not saying I didn’t enjoy it, but whilst chomping through my own body weight in popcorn, I couldn’t help wondering what Andy Flegg might make of it. A keen movie critic and Lord of the Rings (LOTR) fan himself, it seems to me he may have felt a little let down...

Desolation of Smaug review by Andy Flegg

Warning - Contains spoilers!

Here’s the good news - Unlike the movie, this review will not require multiple meal breaks and a family sized adult nappy pack.

In a nutshell, Hobbit 2 continues to follow the adventures of a furry footed Dr Watson from the Sherlock TV series, who for no obvious reason has teamed up with Gandalf the (not very) magical tramp from LOTR, plus a crew of height challenged medieval bikies (AKA the dwarves).

For reasons not clear, the dwarf bikies are convinced that Dr Watson can help them find their ancestral home known as Lost Mountain, that yes, you guessed it - they’ve lost. 

Sadly without the aid of modern day GPS equipment or apparently even a decent map, all of them spend the first few hours of the movie wandering aimlessly around an old LOTR set. The action only really gets going when Gandalf finally gets bored and dumps them for one of his tramp mates. Shortly after this, Dr Watson and the bikies get captured by a very freaky looking Orlando Bloom and his family of angry Swedish hippies (AKA the elves).

It’s never actually explained why the hippies are so angry, but I’m guessing that it may have something to do with Orlando’s disastrous series of DIY botox experiments that have left his once handsome face looking like an over inflated yellow beach ball.

Dr Watson can't help him but luckily he can still do the old ‘one ring to rule everyone’ trick which he cunningly uses to free his little mates. However, shortly after escaping the hippies, the bikies totally luck out again and are set upon by an even angrier mob of Western Sydney Wanderers supporters (AKA the orcs), who presumably mistake them for Melbourne Victory fans.

The good guys eventually get away by cleverly pretending to get smashed to pieces in some rapids and a couple of giant waterfalls. Then their luck finally turns for the better when they meet a sulky boatman who seems to think he’s still auditioning for Aragorn’s part in LOTR. After Sulky Aragorn takes them to his smelly village they fortuitously spot the lost mountain they’ve been looking for, right next door.

After yet another punch up with the angry hippies and the furious soccer thugs, Dr Watson and most of the bikies finally make it up to the mountain. There the head bikie who has spent large chunks of the movie mistakenly reading from Boromir's old LOTR script, decides to send Dr Watson inside the mountain alone. Sadly the furry footed medical sleuth totally stuffs this bit up and wakes a giant dragon who can not only speak perfect English but just happens to have exactly the same voice as Treebeard the Ent  from LOTR. What are the chances?

That’s pretty much it, apart from far too many lame scenes where the bikies try (and fail) to be funny and lots of much more amusing CGI action stuff where the bikies and the hippies compete to see who can come up with the most creative methods for killing the soccer thugs.

As for a Rotten Tomatoes score, I would give it 45% and summarise by saying it was a bit like watching the original LOTR on novocaine whilst having your wisdom teeth taken out by a plumber. Not totally excruciating exactly, but way too much needless gore and definitely took far too long.