The gems in this movie, the best of the Hobbit three, can't offset the ridiculous running time and pointless filler added to artifically expand the running time. The Hobbit, much shorter than any of the Trilogy, only had one full time movie in it. Somewhat fortunately a lot of the meat of the real story was left for this finale. I thought a lot about this - this is the tell: in the Lord of the Rings movies there were extended battle sequences but not extended personal battle sequences, which sort of exposes the attempt to fill the time; I found some of these personal battles tedious. In the LOTR movies the problem was cramming all of the material into the allotted time. Here it's the opposite, so we see too many individual fight sequences which last too damn long. Dain of the dwarfs was spectacular and Thranduil king of the Woodelves very effective. The battle svenes are impressive when kept short. But the source material just isn't up to the LOTR and Jackson certainly couldn't make up the difference.
