The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (2013)

Much as "The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey" was my most anticipated film of 2012, so was "The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug" my most anticipated film of 2013. While the first film was plagued by some substantial pacing issues and overindulgence of stuff that really should have been saved for the inevitable directors cut, I found it to be a fun ride that managed to open the floodgates to memories from my childhood. The second entry was set to absolutely blow the roof off the theater, promising some of the more memorable sequences from the book and introducing the greatest dragon in fantasy literature. Needless to say I was stoked beyond words.

Perhaps too much so, in all honesty. After a year of waiting impatiently, the film is now finally out, and I can't help but feel conflicted over my thoughts on it. Much like the first film, I can't say with a straight face that "The Desolation of Smaug" is a great movie. It suffers from the same problem that the first one had, which is that it's too damn long for no good reason, being padded out by the stuff from the appendices that was not in the original book, which slows the pace down like a drag-chute on occasion.

On the other hand, it's "The Hobbit," so I was still entertained. And to be fair, this is a much faster-paced, rousing, action-packed film that manages to be quite thrilling on more than a number of occasions, and the things that they do right is done very, very, very well. There are moments that are straight up sublime in how accurately they convey the wonderment and adventure from the book. The nerd in me had a very good time, particularly in the first half which follows Bilbo and the dwarfs through Mirkwood, providing the best action in the movie. What can I say? I'm a mark for this crap.

I was singing "The Greatest Adventure" in my head SO HARD at this.

It was when the group reaches Laketown and then Erebor itself that I found myself getting slightly off-put by some things which were not as present in the first film, those being the liberties taken with the story and characters. Some of them are worse than others. Now are any of them enough to make me say that the movie is bad? No, but as a die-hard fan since I was a child, I feel within my rights to objectively and calmly say that I don't think these changes were for the better, they are ultimately pointless, and they reek of studio interference, which I would like to believe that Peter Jackson would be above by this point.

"The Desolation of Smaug" follows Bilbo (Martin Freeman) and company through the forests of Mirkwood and the spiders, escaping the Wood Elves and Legolas (Orlando Bloom), down the river to Laketown, reaching The Lonely Mountain and confronting Smaug himself before ending with a cliffhanger that will no doubt be horrendously frustrating for anybody who hasn't read the book. Throughout the affair they are being chased by Azog and his orcs, who show up every once in a while to inject action scenes where there were none previously. That works I suppose, and does tend to heighten the sense of urgency, but it still smacks slightly of superfluous.

He's kind of the Gilgamesh to the Necromancer's Exdeath.

New additions to the cast include Bard (Luke Evans), a man of Laketown who doesn't seem nearly as badass as he should considering what he manages to accomplish later, and Tauriel (Evangeline Lilly), a wood elf who actually does manage to be a total badass when she's not stuck in a non-canonical and shockingly out-of-place love triangle between her, Legolas and the dwarf Kili (Aidan Turner). While I'm not a huge fan of Evangeline I do think she does a great job here, and is one of the more hardcore characters, which makes it a shame that they thought that they needed to subject her to a cliched and meaningless romantic angle. Luke Evans on the other was just acceptable. He was kind of bland, he didn't really sell me on the character of Bard, and he looks way too much like Orlando Bloom. At first I legitimately thought they put a different wig on Bloom and cast him twice. In fact, the exact same thing happened to me and "The Three Musketeers," which also stared him and Evans. They really need to stop casting them together. It's distracting.

But we're all here to see a dragon, right? And true to my hopes and expectations, once he rises from his massive pile of gold, Smaug did not disappoint. He is sufficiently awesome and scary looking, and Benedict Cumberbatch provides a deep, mountainous rumble of a voice that conveys his power and savagery. I still prefer Richard Boone's portrayal in the animated version, but Cumberbatch is arguably the highlight of the film, as he is in roughly everything that he's in. And while the pacing is different than the source material, much like Gollum and Bilbo's scene in the first film, the famous conversation between Smaug and Bilbo is just as awesome as I was hoping it was going to be. Martin Freeman and Benedict Cumberbatch play so well off of each other that its difficult to imagine anyone else doing it.

The issue I had with Smaug wasn't his portrayal, although he is oddly unobservant on a number of occasions, but the situation that they put him in. Not content with keeping the encounter with the dragon a game of wits and hiding between him and Bilbo, the film unexpectedly pauses the scene about two sentences before it would have normally ended, and decides to inject Thorin and the dwarfs into the situation. This leads to an extended action sequence that finds the dwarfs running around Erebor trying to defeat Smaug in a Boss Battle straight out of a video game. The problem is that literally nothing is accomplished by it. After it's done, Smaug simply picks up the conversation he was having with Bilbo half an hour previously, finishes the thought he had been having, and then flies away. And absolutely nothing had changed. It was as if our regularly scheduled program had been interrupted to bring us an unrelated action scene seconds before it was over.

"Hey. HEY. I'm way too good looking to not get an extended action sequence where I stand on a dragon's head."

I wouldn't have as big a problem with it had the scene accomplished something. But by its very nature it HAS to be pointless because the dwarfs don't defeat Smaug. The dragon flies away to attack Laketown, and there's nothing the movie can do about that. Nothing the dwarfs do there can amount to anything. So why even have them there? Was the movie not long enough? Maybe they wanted to end on a bang, but I tell you what, maybe instead of closing the film with a half hour long fight which is completely meaningless, you could have used that half hour to instead stick an action sequence that actually was in the book in there, and ended the film with Smaug attacking the city. And hey presto, the film would have actually had something close to an ending, too. I can see why they did what they did, but I really don't see the point.

I also feel it necessary to point out that despite the heroics of Thorin and company during the fight with Smaug, in the end, their plan was completely stupid. I'm no Tolkien scholar, and I don't know everything about dragons in that universe, but I am a fairly big nerd. And being a big nerd I must point out that if one desires to kill a dragon - an ancient fire-breathing red dragon - perhaps a strategy involving massive heat is not the way to go. I'm just saying that if your plan to kill a red dragon involves using its own fire to heat something else up which you will then use to attack it, therefore by extension ensuring that at absolute most, the fire will be no hotter than what its own body naturally produces, you have no idea how dragons work and have no business fighting them. And what do you know? We go through half an hour setting up this elaborate scheme, and in the end it does nothing except to mildly irritate Smaug before he walks it off and leaves, which makes less sense now because after all that B.S. they just put him through he'd probably stick around and eat all of them out of pure annoyance.

And maybe I'm being nitpicky...but why in the name of Gandalf's beard does Bilbo take off the ring while talking to Smaug? THAT. MAKES. NO. SENSE.

All that aside, there's still enough to call this a fun time. It's definitely got some fantastic action in it, which really saves it from many of its problems, but I am getting a little irritated at the persistent unnecessary padding this trilogy seems hard-set on subjecting us to. I'm sure we're going to get more of that come next December, as well. But "The Hobbit" is still "The Hobbit," and I can't help but be entertained. I just can't believe that my vision for the extended cut is actually shorter. Who would have thought?

OH MY GOD THIS TRAILER.

THE BOTTOM LINE - "The Desolation of Smaug" is better than "An Unexpected Journey" due to rampant action, a much faster pace, and Smaug The Most Terrible of Calamities. However, it's still too long and there are some weird additions that annoy and some pointless action that is shockingly distracting, at least to me. It's mostly nerdy nit-picking, to be fair, but it's enough to make me feel ever so slightly let down. But it'll probably get better with rewatching, and it's still Tolkien. I'd still rather watch "The Hobbit" cartoon any day, though.

The Raven (2012)

Edgar Allen Poe was a 19th century poet and novelist credited with helping to popularize the short story format, inventing the detective story, and being the first writer to attempt making a living off of it. At the end of his life, he was also involved with a "Se7en"-esque serial killer plot that saw several people horribly murdered using methods described in his stories.

What? You didn't know about that last part?

"The Raven" is one of those movies that likes to play it fast, loose and conspiratorial with history. Much like "From Hell" or perhaps "Abraham Lincoln vs. Zombies" if you want to get really out there, the story only uses history as tenuously placed support beams to try and hold up the narrative, with varying degrees of success. It's not so much that the historical evidence supports what the movie is trying to say, it's that history never came out and specifically said that President Lincoln didn't kill zombies.

"I'm just saying, if there's no record of zombies in D.C. in the 1860's, someone had to kill them..."

Not that the fact that the story is completely ludicrous is enough to make it bad. Anybody who slams this movie for not being historically accurate is being a total snob barking up several wrong categories and genus of flora. I have a sneaking suspicion that was probably the case with much of the reception that "The Raven" received when it was released earlier this year, because I just remember it getting brutally torn to absolute shreds.

I'm not quite sure what people were expecting when going into a movie that has Edgar Allen Poe chasing down a guy who is going around killing people like he's the Zodiac Killer. Perhaps reality should be checked at the door.

Does that mean I liked "The Raven?" Well, it depends. On a purely subjective level, it was just kind of "meh." It wasn't bad, but it didn't really do a whole lot for me, despite being fairly pretty to look at, and being reasonably engaging in terms of story. I did truly want to know what was going to happen next, and that's not anything to shake a pendulum at. Am I going to remember it in a few weeks time? Probably not. Much of it is already fading, which is the mark of a pretty sub-standard movie.

This is either Cusack being intense or my reaction whenever I watch Dane Cook.

However, when checked against the apocalyptic reception it got from critics and the box office, it's far better than you might expect it to be. Honestly, people, it's not that bad, despite what you may have heard. At least "The Raven" didn't offend me to my core. This isn't the "Total Recall" remake or anything. It was just trying to do something a bit different. And yeah, it didn't succeed that well, but we should be happy to see some originality in movies as opposed to bland PG-13 shlock.

The first thing about "The Raven" that I wasn't so keen on was John Cusack. I know he's got a big fanbase but I've never been a huge fan of his. I think it's because I didn't watch John Hughes-style comedies in the 80's and early 90's. Would you believe I've never seen "Pretty In Pink" or "Real Genius?" For some reason a bunch of those movies just passed me by. And for some reason many of them starred John Cusack. Now I watch movies like that and that nostalgia factor just isn't there for me. I think the Cusack Express has officially passed me by.

I will say that Cusack wasn't horrible as Edgar Allan Poe. At least once the movie got past the first act, that is. When we meet Poe, Cusack is playing him in such an over-the-top obnoxious manner that it's honestly hard to watch. An early scene in a bar where Poe starts begging for a drink by using his fame as credit quickly crosses the line from awkward to uncomfortable and kind of sad. I never thought I'd see John Cusack try to "out-Nicolas Cage" Nicolas Cage, but boy did he try. Cusack wishes he was that awesome.

Seriously, he's one step short of "AAARGH!!!! SOMEONE'S TRYIN' TA KILL ME, MAN!!!!"

As the film progresses Cusack does become more likable once he gets off the whole "half-mad egomaniac" thing. And much of the movie is really about him becoming less pathetic and coming to terms with his inner demons, which is admittedly pretty good stuff as far as character development goes. The big problem, however, is that the genesis of that is a murder mystery with a very lame villain whose motivations literally boil down to a fan being mad that Poe stopped writing.

I know that story has kind of been done before, the prime example I can think of being "Misery," but Kathy Bates wasn't constructing "Saw" level traps and torture devices. She was just a crazy lady who broke James Caan's ankles when he wrote an ending she didn't like. Crazy usually doesn't get that elaborate unless you're a Batman villain. But in "The Raven," the killer is constructing this grand scheme like John Doe from "Se7en" all because he wants more poetry. My, my Grandma, what deep motivations you have.

Also, don't bother trying to figure out who the killer is, because you won't. That's not because it's such a deep mystery. It's because when the killer is unmasked, it's a character who has had maybe two lines and 20 seconds of screen time in the entire film up to that point. They are literally a background character. There's no way to deduce or solve anything beforehand, especially since the ONE CLUE that may have been a hint isn't even shown to us until after the killer has already unmasked themselves.

And at that point you'll still be trying to figure out who the hell this character is anyways.

I would also like to call out the crap talents of one Alice Eve. She plays Poe's love interest, Emily. And well, I'm not sure how to politely say this, so I won't bother with being polite. She is an absolutely dreadful actress. Simply horrendous. She speaks like she's reading her lines off a cue card and is about as believable in her emoting as CGI Yoda. It also doesn't help that when she smiles, it looks like she's inhaled some of The Joker's Smylex Gas.

I think the final straw for me as far as her performance went was a scene were she gets buried alive. As it's happening, she starts pleading with the killer to let her out with the same kind of intensity and fear in her voice as someone bringing back a defective product to the store they bought it from would have: somewhat stern but respectfully polite. Then he tells her to shut up. She meekly says "Okay." It would have been laughable had it been a comedy.

"Oh. I'm buried alive. That's disappointing to me..."

You want to hear the best part? She's going to be in "Star Trek Into Darkness." How fun. They've cast the same waste of space that was terrible in one of the worst movies I saw this year in one of the movies I'm looking most forward to next year. Thanks for that.

So a lousy villain and some suspect acting aside, what did "The Raven" have going for it that made it not as bad as everyone was saying it was? I think what it all comes down to is that the story is interesting to watch unfold, because before the disappointing reveal makes us feel like we've wasted our time, there is pretty good tension being held in terms of the "why" question. Honestly it's a cool idea - that being using a horror writer's work to actually kill people, all while challenging them to solve riddles sprung from their own imagination. In a way it's like watching a man do battle with his dark half that somehow emerged and started killing. In fact, if that literally happened, you could make an awesome horror flick with that plot.

That sounds like a way better movie. See, this is why I should be in charge of stuff. It would all be so much better. And Nicolas Cage could be the dark half of Edgar Allan Poe!

YES.

It's all coming together.

THE BOTTOM LINE - "The Raven," while not great, it not the horror show train-wreck it was made out to be. Fans of Poe might get some amusement out of the constant references to his body of work and life, but they could just as easily be annoyed by it at the same time. It really depends on how seriously you're taking it. My advice: Don't do that. It also helps to have low expectations, too.

The Three Musketeers (2011)

There comes a time, every once in a while, when you are watching a film and you have a moment of clarity. It's a moment that truly puts everything in perspective for you. My moment for "The Three Musketeers" came when a scene from "Pirates of The Caribbean" was reenacted with blimps.

I think it was right around the time in this movie when the two steampunky-wooden-battleship-zeppelin-thingys were battling over 17th century Paris, only to end up being impaled on one of the towers of Notre Dame Cathedral, looking not unlike two giant pancakes with cannons while dudes in poofy shirts swashbuckled all over the place that I realized "You know what? This is pretty silly."

Ok that last statement was not entirely accurate. I was saying "This is pretty silly" after the 35 second mark. It really hits the ground running in that respect. The blimp part was when I simply said it aloud, since at that point, it really needed to be noted for the official record.

So yes, "The Three Musketeers" is hereby award the official mark of Silliness.

"Now bugger off."

I have a confession to make: I've never liked any Musketeer movie. I remember seeing the one with Keifer Sutherland back in the day, and I didn't like that one either, even at the time. They just have this over-the-top ridiculous nature that irritates me, maybe because I just don't get it. It's not because it's over-the-top. Not at all. You're talking to a guy who loves Nicolas Cage and Reb Brown. I can handle over-the-top.

I think the big issue for me is that it seems all the Musketeer movies have tried to "modernize" the story in an effort to make it more "awesome." The action is filmed in such a way that you can tell it really desperately wants to be a Michael Bay or John Woo style explosion fest. The problem is that back in those days, there weren't bazookas or grenade launchers or Uzis or convenient barrels of gasoline to shoot and blow up. There also wasn't Arnold Schwarzenegger.

For that reason, things blow up that really have no business exploding, people seem to have super-human acrobatic abilities, and this really bizarre, unsettling "old-world-super-tech" exists that is clearly the result of the filmmakers having played WAY too much "Assassin's Creed." Zeppelin Battleships aside, there's some pretty ridiculous steampunk inspired weaponry in this movie that is the closest they could get to modern weapons, but it quickly gets stupid.

Why is this is the Queen's closet? How do her servants get in there? Do they take it down every time the Queen needs another pair of shoes? Who puts it back up? Wouldn't a locked door work better? How about a guard? Does Paul W.S. Anderson really need to rip off scenes from "Resident Evil?"

All I'm saying is that when you have Ye Olde Laser Trappes...just break down and give Athos a laptop complete with GPS tracking capability already. Just say Da Vinci invented it and satellites. That's your excuse for every other piece of absurd tech they have.

It's clear that the reason for all of this is to make the 17th century as "awesome" as the 21st. Because apparently, the filmmakers don't think just plain old swordfighting is cool. I got news for them: it is. Swordfighting is cool. It's always been cool. It doesn't need your help, nor the 21st century's help. And I can prove this in three syllables - Errol Flynn.

Pictured above - Awesome.

You see, in a movie about swordfighting heroes, I want to see swordfighting...not silly gadgets that read like someone's Jules Verne/"Mission:Impossible" fanfic. Is that so much to ask?

At some point I feel I should talk about such trivial matters such as the plot, but what's the point? Why should you care if the movie doesn't care? I you are wondering if the plot is like the book, no it's not. Next silly question, please.

I can't say that the main cast was entirely noteworthy for me. Logan Lerman is the main character, D'Artagnan, which I always thought was weird that the unofficial fourth Musketeer is the main character in a story called "The Three Musketeers." Anyways. Logan was Percy Jackson...so yeah...real excitement there. Luke Evans and Matthew Macfadyen as Aramis and Athos were essentially unknown to me. Ray Stevenson was the only one of the Musketeers I recognized, having taken over for Tom Jane in the second "Punisher" movie.

That isn't to say that the supporting cast wasn't made up of talented people - Milla Jovovich, Christoph Waltz and Madds Mikkelsen play the bad guys and they are all decent, although Milla seems like she's still playing Alice from "Resident Evil" at times. I like all these people...and then there's Orlando Bloom. He plays what I guess is supposed to be the "Big Bad" of the film, but ends up just kind of being...annoying and faffs about a lot.

The funny thing is that I had NO IDEA that was Orlando Bloom. Oh, I knew he was in it, but I thought he was Aramis! I saw Luke Evans and thought it was Orlando Bloom. For the entire movie. It wasn't until the credits were rolling that I saw his name under "Buckingham" and I was stunned. It made his character that much more ridiculous when it was revealed that annoying piece of crap with a 17th century mullet was Orlando Bloom. That's hilarious.

He looks like Danny McBride in Tropic Thunder.

Did I have a point here? Was this just a rambling diatribe with no real goal other than to say something -- anything -- about a movie that was just so loud and obnoxious that I honestly have a difficult time remembering specifics other than loud noises and poofy shirts? Not really.

THE BOTTOM LINE - "The Three Musketeers" is silly. Very silly. Absurdly silly. But you probably knew that from the trailer. It's just as silly as you thought it was. There is big, dumb, loud, stupid entertainment to be had if you dig that kind of thing, and there is one (1) good swordfight at the end between Lerman and Madds Mikkelksen which is admittedly really, really good. Other than that, stick a pot on your head and have a friend bang it with a hammer for two hours. Same effect. Skip it.