![]() The absurdity is winning: you're laughing with, not laughing at. It's mysterious and strange and yet Jackson also effortlessly conjures up that genial quality that distinguishes The Hobbit from the more solemn Rings stories. ![]() The Desolation of Smaug is a cheerfully entertaining and exhilarating adventure tale, a supercharged Saturday morning picture. My colleague Peter Bradshaw is also impressed with the manner in which Jackson has "picked up the pace" in part two. Kingdom-under-the-mountain Erebor, on the other hand, is the kind of mad location that could only exist on a Weta mega-computer, its centrepiece a stash of wealth so vast it would give Scrooge McDuck a quacking fit. The former, a fog-shrouded, Dickensian burg that we're informed 'stinks of fish oil and tar', is a new, pleasingly earthy flavour for Middle-earth. The forest domain of the Silvan Elves has beauty edged with menace … but the real standouts are Lake-town and Erebor, contrasting but equally stunning showcases of production design. Here, you can feel Jackson's relief at having entirely new worlds in which to play. One problem with the former film was that it re-trod too closely the footsteps of the Fellowship: it was difficult to share Bilbo's awe at entering Rivendell, given that we'd already been there 11 years before. Nick de Semlyen of Empire magazine labels The Desolation of Smaug "a huge improvement on the previous instalment". But for the most part he moves the episodic tale along with reasonable speed for a leviathan while serving up enough fights, close shaves and action-filled melodrama for an old-fashioned movie serial or a modern video game. Toward the end, his perennial tendency to let bloat creep in reasserts itself to an extent … he has a hard time knowing when enough is enough even as the three-hour goalpost looms dead ahead. Nearly everything … represents an improvement over the first instalment of Peter Jackson's three-part adaptation of JRR Tolkien's beloved creation," "After exhibiting an almost craven fidelity to his source material the first time out, Jackson gets the drama in gear here from the outset with a sense of storytelling that possesses palpable energy and purpose. ![]() Todd McCarthy of the Hollywood Reporter writes: ![]()
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