The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug
Peter Jackson's "The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug" should never have been made and doesn't deserve to be mentioned in the same breath as Jackson's "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy. After making three films from three Tolkien books, Jackson has now made the second of three films from one comparatively brief novel, a 161-minute would-be epic, in which the strain to stretch and inflate is apparent in virtually every frame.
You could get sidetracked talking about "The Hobbit" trilogy as a mercenary and cynical exercise, but the movie business has been mercenary and cynical since before Mary Pickford put on knee socks.
How it falls short
Results are all that matter, and the result here is that "The Desolation of Smaug" fails in almost every way, as a story, as an adventure, as a piece of art direction and as a visual spectacle.
The look is murky, with the outdoor scenes shot almost entirely in grays and dark greens, and the indoor scenes in browns and earth tones.
The 3-D adds nothing, except to muddle and darken the picture further. Don't imagine the sunlit, Italianate vistas of Middle-earth, but shadowy caves, shadowy woods, shadowy narrow streets and the shadowy insides of blasted castles.
If you see it, notice the transparent effort made to render dramatic and full of import the minor pulse beats of ... not even a story, but a thin sliver of a story. Notice the intrusive soundtrack, swelling to instruct us how to feel, as the camera moves in suddenly on Gandalf's face for the grand pronouncement: "They mean war!"
This kind of thing is done over and over again, hammering home the idea, "This is big, get ready," but too many times, like the boy who cried wolf.
Everything is emphasized, and so nothing has emphasis. Everything is pumped full of importance, and so nothing has importance. Meanwhile, the balance between action and character in the book is lost.
The loss of balance
Perhaps the loss of that balance was inevitable as soon as they decided to make three movies instead of one. After all, you can't take a book known and loved by millions and start devising completely new and interesting things for the characters to say and do, because in doing so you'll change the characters. You can only extend what's there.
But scenes of dialogue don't lend themselves to extension, and neutral scenes of characters announcing the status quo or complimenting each other are pointless. Action scenes, however - those can be tripled, quadrupled ...
Thus, Martin Freeman, who plays Bilbo Baggins and is very good (or could be), spends most of the movie just standing around. Yet the movie actually includes an action sequence of the secondary character, Legolas, fighting off a pack of ugly, evil Orcs for something like two full minutes of screen time. It's action, all right, but it's not active in the sense of advancing the story.
No, the story is just sitting there waiting while Orlando Bloom goes through the motions of stabbing various monsters in the head.
The mission, which you might remember from last year's "The Hobbit," is to go into the lair of a dragon called Smaug so as to steal the Arkenstone. Bilbo, Gandalf (Ian McKellen) and a team of dwarfs are still on the case, inching toward the dragon's domain, but with lots of side adventures so as to run out the clock.
Not much progress
By the end of the movie, you may be amazed at the progress they haven't made. The traditional way of ending part two of a trilogy is to resolve one crisis, only to show another looming on the horizon. Well, forget it. "The Desolation of Smaug" just stops in the middle of something and then justifies its clumsiness with a curtain line that rings hollow.
Here and there, a graceful shot will come along to remind you that Peter Jackson is still alive somewhere in there, and McKellen, with his wonderful presence and diction, provides some pleasure as Gandalf. There are also rare moments when it's possible to remember author J.R.R. Tolkien and hear in some of the lines - "Are we not part of this world?" - echoes of the book's origin in the fraught years leading up to World War II.
But these are straws in the wind. Tolkien is barely there, and Middle-earth lies in ruins.
Mick LaSalle is The San Francisco Chronicle's movie critic. E-mail: mlasalle@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @MickLaSalle
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