Kurt Loder Reviews: The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies
The concluding installment of Peter Jackson's misbegotten Hobbit trilogy is an action-packed muddle. There are some terrific shots and scenes, and of course the digital effects are top-of-the-line, writes Kurt Loder. But the story, a continued inflation of J.R.R. Tolkien's slender 1937 novel, remains emptily overstuffed; and the endless noisy contentions between the titular five armies (or four, or possibly six, maybe more) soon challenge our ability to care about what's going on.