The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (2014) **/*****

While Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy is a landmark series of films that will go down in history as being seminal works, his prequel trilogy, The Hobbit, has been a mixed bag that has produced diminishing returns. At this point, this is the sixth film that Jackson has made that’s set in this same world, striking this same tone, and that has a run time that’s well over two hours. Even for huge fans of the overall franchise, the magic has to be running out. Truth be told, though The Hobbit started off as a less than perfect though perfectly entertaining companion piece to The Lord of the Rings, with this final chapter, The Battle of the Five Armies, the series as a whole has revealed itself to be quite a tedious slog.

If you’ve seen the first two Hobbit movies, then you should have a good idea of what this one is about. If you haven’t, then you’re going to be confused, because Five Armies exists as little more than an extended action climax that caps off all of the setup that was put into place by the first two films. When The Desolation of Smaug ended, the dragon Smaug (Benedict Cumberbatch) had left his home in The Lonely Mountain and was heading toward the nearest town, presumably with the intention of destroying it and killing everyone who lives there. When we pick things up in this film, that’s just what’s happening. The dragon attack is big and spectacular and starts the film off on an exciting note. And then another big action scene follows it. And another. And another. It doesn’t take long before the sight of hoards of CG beings smashing into each other becomes numbing and boring.

Oz the Great and Powerful (2013) **/*****

Seeing as The Wizard of Oz came out 74 years ago, and it’s still the sort of beloved classic that gets watched and re-watched on a regular basis by fans young and old, you might think that it should be one of those sacred cows that you just don’t fiddle with. That hasn’t stopped Disney from making this prequel though. Director Sam Raimi and writers Mitchell Kapner and David Lindsay-Abaire bring us this look at exactly how the wizard Dorothy quested to meet in the original film (and L. Frank Baum’s novel) came to leave Kansas and take up residence in the Land of Oz, how he managed to convince everyone there that he was a powerful wizard, and how he used that perceived power to become to ruler of the place. Whatever your feelings about whether or not a prequel to The Wizard of Oz should have been made, it’s here, so the only thing we can do is try to view it on its own terms and critique it as a standalone project. So, how does it fare in that respect? Unfortunately, not so great. Even with the kinetic style of Sam Raimi behind the camera, Oz the Great and Powerful is kind of a bore.

One of the main reasons this is the case is the script’s simplicity and lack of nuance. That might seem like a strange complaint to lob at a movie that’s a prequel to a childhood fairytale, but Oz takes a much more realist approach to its material than The Wizard of Oz did. In that film, Dorothy was just a stand-in character for the children in the audience, used to embody their fears of being separated from their parents and to teach the simple lesson that “there’s no place like home,” but Oz (James Franco) is a grown man with faults and ambitions. He has more of a personal journey to take and much more growth to do as an individual. Even the witches, who seemed to be mythic creatures that were a step above humanity in The Wizard of Oz, have human emotions and motivations here. This might have been an interesting direction to go in, but unfortunately the establishing of everyone’s characters and the journeys that they end up taking are all so cookie-cutter and telegraphed that they feel like they’re the stuff of broad fairytales anyway. You see where this movie is going from the very start, and there aren’t any real thrills or laughs that get provided along the way, so watching it just feels like a boring biding of time before the story finally decides to wrap itself up. Boring and Oz aren’t two words that should go together. 

Snow White and the Huntsman (2012) ***/*****

By now everyone probably has the Snow White story pretty well memorized. It’s one of the most famous fairy tales of all time and, heck, Hollywood just gave us a big screen adaptation of the tale a few weeks ago with Tarsem Singh’s Mirror Mirror. So what is it that sets Rupert Sanders’ new take on the material, Snow White and the Huntsman, apart? What does it have to offer that makes yet another retelling of the classic Snow White story necessary? Not much, really. It’s a little bit more gothic, aesthetically, it’s a little more horror inspired, tonally, and it replaces the charming Prince with a bad boy anti-hero. So, add that all up and I guess the thing that separates Snow White and the Huntsman from other versions of the Snow White story is the fact that it’s being sold to teenage girls rather than pre-teen girls. If you’re a teenage girl, especially one that saw yourself in Kristen Stewart’s portrayal of Bella in the Twilight films, or drooled over Chris Hemsworth’s pecs in Thor, then that’s got to be good news. For the rest of us, not so much. But, all things considered, this one could have turned out a lot worse.