“Stoker”
Directed by Chan Wook-Park
Starring Mia Wasikowska, Matthew Goode, Nicole Kidman, Jacki Weaver
Drama/Mystery/Thriller
99 mins
R

Korean director Chan Wook Park‘s Stoker is a product of great precision. Each shot is brilliantly articulated and poised with such deliberation that it’s impossible to ignore the artistry and preparedness in each and every frame.

Mia Wasikowska (Alice in Wonderland) plays India, a loner type whose father has just died, the Eve to Matthew Goode‘s biblical garden-dwelling snake. The stars align as India finds herself in a perfectly helpless state when her previously unknown uncle arrives and the game of cat and mouse beings. Although India initially pushes him away, she finds herself slowly seduced by the mystery that is her uncle Charlie.

Charlie, with his vampirically sparkling eyes and cloaked intentions, is an enigma off the bat. We as an audience know that something is amiss from the first time we glimpse him, standing over the funeral on a hazy distant hill, and yet when we met him there is an immediate air of allure seeping from the chiseled jawed, stony persona that makes up Charlie.

As Korean director Park’s, who directed the cult hit Oldboy, first foray into the American film industry, he manages to maintain the same level of fierce detail and intelligent zeal that defines his predominantly visual storytelling. Park’s fervor for intricate story-boarding, for which he is famous, is clearly evident onscreen as each shot perfectly transitions into the next with the effortlessness of a professional ballet troupe. Even with a thick language barrier between Park and his cast, he seems to have directed them in exactly the way that he intended down to the subtlest movement and the slightest sway of the camera. With Stoker, Park is a puppet master with a tenacious handle on the reins.

Even as the title cards play, a sense of Hitchcockian mystique that brands the film is established but it’s not until everything is said and done that everything comes full circle and clicks into place. Moments that once seemed little more than fruitless experiments with visual artistry later become cornerstones to the masterful smattering of foreshadow. It’s within this careful positioning of all the pieces tha a rarely accomplished feel of competition to the film emerges as does a lasting sense of wonder. Where ever these characters go from here, I would most certainly like to see that journey and yet it is not only the seen but the unseen that makes the film such a taut little piece of suspense.

In terms of the performances in the piece, Wasikowska’s brooding India is just as shrouded in gothic mystery as her uncle Charlie. As the constant chiming of clocks and syncopated clack of metronomes click in the background, we can only make guesswork as to what exactly makes India tick. As the film opens on her 18th birthday, this is the tale of her transition into adulthood, a exploration of a troubled teen and who she chooses to become.Having been a gung-ho daddy’s girl all her life, India’s relationship with her mother, played by Nicole Kidman, has always been lackluster to her mother’s dismay.

Kidman is the real tragic character here, playing a lonely, pitiable woman who really seemed to try to foster a relationship with her dismissive daughter but could never break down the icy boundaries between them. While I was at first under the impression that mother Evelyn would be painted as a villain, I found myself siding with this pleading, tragic character. Sure, maybe she should have tried a little harder in the past to be a better mother but there is an insurmountable misunderstanding between her and India that just cannot be summited.
 

Matthew Goode as Uncle Charlie is more than good and while it doesn’t take a long time to figure out that he’s a bona fide creeper, it’s the unpacking of what makes him such an eerie presence that gives Goode an opportunity to shine. There is so much festering behind his impossibly blue-hued eyes that the scenes were he just stares at India or Evelyn or just out into space are totally hypnotic. While I don’t want to give too much away here, it often seems that Goode channels that final moment that we see Norman Bates in the perfectly slow pan out in Psycho.

After all is said and done, Stoker adds up to a wonderfully paced creep-fest that knows exactly where to mine for the best elements of suspense. It’s morbid revelry in the underbelly of family secrets offers up some tasty moments of macabre and underscores the film with a lurid fascination with the root of all evil. What lingers on after the credits roll is this creeping sense that malevolence may just be hereditary.

 

As an artistic endeavor, Spring Breakers has the depth of a comb-over and the appeal of a Girls Gone Wild DVD rendered in slow motion. That is to say, it could be worse. Unfortunately for filmmaker Harmony Korine, no-one cued him in to the fact that his audience, even a predominantly male audience, can only ogle at bobbling breasts and sun-scorched beaches for so long before they start to remember that they’re in a movie theater to see an actual film. An actual film being something this experimental montage doesn’t ever add up to.

Korine quickly lathers on a wallpaper of foreshadow as we meet four college chicks whose purposed bone-deep friendship seems impossible or at least highly unlikely. As Candy (Vanessa Hudgens) and Brit (Ashley Benson) doddle pictures of dongs in their dimly lit lecture, Cottie (Rachel Korine who is actually the wife of director Harmony) slugs down bong rips and the shamelessly named Faith (Disney‘s Selena Gomez) half-heartedly attends a youth church group. Faith’s church friends pound home the fact that the other girls are bad news but the message only partially comes across to the thick-headed do-gooder.

In order to finance their trip to an unnamed but stereotypical Spring Break locale, Candy and Brit talk Cottie into stealing her professor’s car so that they can rob a restaurant. Bing, bang, boom, they grab the cash, scoop up Faith and make off to Florida. Instead of trying to flesh out the mental states of these wild childs or attempt to rationalize the unexplained addition of Faith, a character who clearly wouldn’t be morally on board with these highly illegal endeavors, Korine glosses over the affair with a montage of boobies. And while the hypnotic barrage of slow motion bouncing breasts and brain-blistering dubstep tunes almost tricked us into forgetting that we are supposed to be watching a narrative with plot and character develop, he doesn’t quite get away with it this time. Nice try but no dice.

Interspliced between sun-baked shots of partially nude and, of course, fully nude people (mind you: these are humans that don’t look like people I’d ever want to hang out with) fist bumping, water bouncing, doing all imaginable kinds of hooking up and executing copious bong rips and lines of blow, is some sembleance of the girls “discovering themselves” or at least that’s what they say to their mommies when they call home to gloat…I mean report in. Again, we don’t see them doing any kind of soul searching out here, just a lot of good old fashion partying like a rock star. We may be told that there is something more going on with these girls but there’s no evidence of that onscreen.

Finally, a flicker of thesbianic hope enters the equation when the girls wind up in jail for partying way too hard and are serendipitously bailed out by a gold-plate toothed James Franco, who simply goes by the name Alien. Flunky-rapper by day and drug-kingpin by night, Franco immediately illuminates the screen with his G-diction and farcical little characer bits, offering a much needed lump of levity  and opening up the narrative to new possibilities. Unfortunately, Korine squanders the opportunities afforded him by Franco and simply allows the film to flounder in a new wading pool of mediocrity.

It’s not hard to miss the cautionary warning mixed up in their affair about the dangers of drugs, sex and power but it’s carried out with the subtly of a pink elephant. It gets to the point where the pitiable well of scripted narrative runs dry so the few clunky through lines peppered through Spring Breakers are repeated again and again, broadcasting an impractically tone-deafness on the part of Korine to the ridiculous redundancies scattered throughout the film that babble on and on like a broken record.

While it might not be fair to point the finger exclusively at Korine, it’s just hard to swallow that this film was actually edited by an actual editor. At it’s core, there stands a powerful message about the captivating sway of the unorthodox, the hypnotic descent and the fierce disillusionment of reality but it’s totally let down by a sweltering decrescendo in momentum and just plain dumb film-making. Things get wild and things get racy when you’re under the spell of a neon-streaked Spring Break rave but when you’re not jammed full of ecstasy, it’s fairly easy to see the abundantly uninteresting attendees and the seams come melting apart.

In Spring Breakers defense, it’s not all bad. I didn’t hate the nudity, in fact, I rather liked it but that seductive allure is hardly an excuse for the badly bandaged final product this movie turned out to be. Also on the plus side, we can add in Franco and a memorably avante garde shoot out but that’s about it. If some well written scribe had sat down and churned out about 20-30 more pages to tack into the script or made the executive decision to turn this helplessly wandering narrative into a short film, I’m sure it would have been a lot more successful. Instead, Korine overextends himself again and again, winding up with an undeniably titillating film characterized by shallow character development, endless montages and the worst editing this side of Bollywood.

I don’t think that it’s any big secret that I’m not the biggest fan of comedy movies (which is ironic considering that I’m a pretty damn funny guy) and the same is the case with The Incredible Burt Wonderstone. For me, comedies thrive on one element alone: laughs — and like many other comedies, Wonderstone departs too much from the actual laughs to pursue a sense of uplifting drama that doesn’t add much. It’s a serviceable film that mines some absurdist laughs but I hoped for more from the pairing of Carrel and Carrey. It’s just another comedy in over its head that didn’t bother to find quite enough jokes but still manages to slide by on its earnest, if saccharine, sweetness.

Steve Carrell plays the eponymous character whose act with partner and childhood friend Anton (Steve Bushemi) reached its commercial success in the nineties and they’ve been running on fumes ever since. When new-age street magician Steve Grey (Jim Carrey) upstages their act, Burt and Anton find their star plummeting fast. In the aftermath, Wonderstone struggles with lost celebrity as he tries to rediscover the magic of being a magician.


Much like the characters within, the filmrelies heavily on physical comedy to mixed results. Jim Carrey seems to inhabit the space that made him such a riotous physical performer twenty years ago but my nostalgia for the “golden age” of Carrey comedy seems at odds with my current comedic sensibilities. Funny faces and guttural screams of pain aren’t what they once were. Perhaps I’ve grown up or maybe the world is moving into an age where comedy has to be rife with darkness in order to truly resonate but, one way or another, I couldn’t really summon the belly laughs that many other people in the theater seemed to.

Sure, Carey scores some laughs with his outrageous street “magic,”

 particularly a scene involving an egged-on spectator, but he does little more than these flashy, infrequent bits. My personal favorite character in the film is probably Buschemi’s Anton because he’s so meek and peculiar. He doesn’t do anything particularly funny but he’s undeniably the heart of the story.  

Olivia Wilde‘s Jane, on the other hand, I had trouble buying. When she confessed that she was picked on at school for doing magic, my suspension of disbelief went out the window. We’re talking about Olivia Wilde. This Olivia Wilde. Once again, the uninspired casting of the youngest, most beautiful girl possible just discredits the narrative they’re trying to sell us.

I think my biggest issues with comedies in general is that they almost always try and shoehorn in a clunky emotional arc about the protagonist finding love, rediscovering himself or reconnecting with a lost friend. All three are the case in The Incredible Burt Wonderstone, and even though it works a little better here than usual, it’s just yesterday’s white bread repackaged. I know that flavor and I’m not particularly fond of it. For the bit of warmth we feel for the film and the characters, we can point to Carrell who infuses an inimitable quirky earnestness in all of the characters he plays, even though he starts off as a total douche-bag here.

As the dramedies of a post-Judd Apatow culture seem to be steadily increasing and consequently wearing themselves thin, it’s good to see a traditional comedy –  however safe and traditional it may be. Its conventionality though is no excuse for the obvious lack of comedic gold prepared for this one. If only the writers had locked themselves in a dark room for a little longer, this might have been more memorable but ultimately it’s a serviceable one-and-done that, no matter how inoffensive, is hardly worth recommending.

C-

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“Warm Bodies”
Directed by Jonathan Levine
Starring Teresa Palmer, Nicholas Hoult, Rob Corddy, John Malkovich, Dave Franco, Analeigh Tipton
Comedy, Horror, Romance
98 Mins
PG-13

Jonathan Levine‘s Warm Bodies is a semi-successful experiment in cross-dressing genres. It’s an inventive blend that tries to be self-satirizing within a somewhat traditional rom-com formula. The result is a zom-rom-com that feels both too safe and too unorthodox to capture much of a franchise-building following.

In a world where evil depends on the amount of skin still on your bones, human Julie, played by Teresa Palmer (I Am Number Four), falls under the protection of zombie R, played by Nicholas Hoult (X-Men: First Class), and the two of them begin to develop a somehow not creepy but definitively necrophiliac relationship.

Since R is still pretty human looking, he’s a good zombie while other skinless zombies, called “bonies”, are human-eating id-machines. R’s mission is to save Julie from the malevolent bonies while trying to re-assimilate the undead into the world of the living.

While Hoult’s R may be dead, him and Palmer have real chemistry and are a much preferable on-screen couple to Twilightites Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson. Hoult manages to avoid the easy undead caricature and actually breathes life into this dead dude, a task Pattinson never could accomplish. Palmer likewise creates a female lead who is empowered and likeable, essentially the polar opposite of K Stew. Although the emotional narrative relies heavily on voice overs, the leads shoot enough ironic passion-laden glances to cut through the potential cheese factor that dominated the Twilight saga.

Something you’re sure not to miss is the hefty load of allusions to Romeo and Juliet that Levine, who directed last year’s under-appreciated 50/50, doesn’t bother to bury. First up, take our heroes names, R and Julie, an obvious tip of the hat to the Bard’s most famous ill-fated loved. Furthermore, our heroes are also each embedded within incompatible cultures that refuse to understand each other, however in this universe, R’s people hunger for the flesh of Julie’s people. A slight change up from the original. And for those who have yet to catch on to the R&J references at this point, a familiar looking balcony scene is sure to make the connection click. Filling out the cast we have

 Filling out the cast we have Rob Corddry (Hot Tub Time Machine) getting the laughs going with some well-timed grunts and cusses while John Malkovich (RED) plays the generic, type-A, overbearingly aggressive father that we’ve seen a million times before.

One of my biggest things that Warm Bodies does to hurt itself is it’s shameless sense of cheating in itself. There are multiple moments where Levine breaks the rules that he has established for his universe in order to propel the narrative along. I call this shameless because these inconsistencies are never acknowledged and yet sit there like an awkward elephant in the room. If zombies can’t talk, don’t let them miraculously have a quick-paced conversation just to hurry up the plot. That’s called cheating.

Additionally, the onscreen violence is noticeable lacking as Warm Bodies, which is still a zombie film, is almost entirely bereft of blood done in cheap CGI. While I get the desire to grab a PG-13 cut, the internal battle between satire and mass appeal feels a little disingenuous, even though I’ll admit to understanding the tactic. 

On that note, it’s hard to pinpoint the target audience for this new genre entry, it’s too bloodless to appeal to the main zombie camp and too mocking and wink-wink to capture the teeny boppin’ twihards in withdrawal and while it’s certainly better than Twilight, it’s nowhere need the greatness of Zombieland.

In the end, Warm Bodies is kind of a mixed bags that isn’t bad so much as forgettable. On one side of the spectrum, it goes out of it’s way to poke fun at itself, never taking it’s silly zombies-reanimating-via-the-power-of-love premise too seriously and yet it fails to take that satire full force and this leaves us with an end product that is too involved with trying to be too many things.

“Side Effects“
Directed by Steven Soderbergh
Starring Jude Law, Rooney Mara, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Channing Tatum
Crime, Drama, Thriller
106 Mins
R

 

With Side Effects, Steven Soderbergh (Ocean’s Eleven) hasn’t reinvented the thriller, he’s just breathed life back into a fading genre. What begins as an ambiguous tale of a struggling romance morphs into a pulsing question mark whose greatest strengths lie within it’s ability to create suspense and uncertainty.

Since the twists and turns are vital to your general enjoyment of the film, I want to carefully navigate to ensure that nothing here is too telling. All you really need to know is that the story opens with Rooney Mara (The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo) reuniting with her husband Channing Tatum (Magic Mike) and from there delves quickly and fervently into the world of psychiatry and prescription pills.

Filling out the cast we have Jude Law (Sherlock Holmes) playing a psychiatrist struggling with a puzzle of a patient. He has a great little character arc that is handled with subtle panache, pulling a muted transformation in the most understated of ways. His new client puts him in contact with a fellow colleague played by Catherine Zeta Jones (The Mask of Zorro) who has an unwritten history with Law’s patient. Although we don’t see Jones that often on screen anymore, she shows that she’s still gotta talent within her 40-something sex appeal.

All four of the principal characters are putting their all in here and I’d expect nothing less under the lead of Soderbergh. He has a crisp, clear direction and a really deliberate framing. All of his shots are captured with concise precision. Nothing here feels left to chance as little bits of foreshadowing are dug intricately into the scenery for those watching with a careful eye.

Soderbergh has talked at length about how he felt Side Effects was the natural progression of the thriller which he asserts have died out in the past few decades. To a degree, he’s right. As an audience, we’re not accustom to the suspense builders than dominated the silver screen of the 80’s and 90’s and so something like Side Effects is a pleasant throwback.

In the same vein though, it fails to really transcend the trappings of the genre and provide anything groundbreaking. And while you can applaud it’s level of self restraint, both within the acting and directing field, it just doesn’t have the staying power of films that transcend their genres. While it truly is a completely competent and very well acted, nothing here feels new or remarkable. It’s a great suspense thriller just not a genuinely great movie.

There’s enough backstabbing, lies, betrayals and revelations to keep Side Effects tautand the audience on the edge of their seats. It’s a rare thriller that manages to deliver on the thrills and much like the thrillers of the 80’s and 90’s it will keep you engaged for it’s run-time but is unlikely to stay with you long after.

B

“Les Miserables”
Directed by Tom Hooper
Starring Hugh Jackman, Russell Crowe, Anne Hathaway, Amanda Seyfried,  Sacha Baron Cohen, Helena Bonham Carter, Eddie Redmayne, Samantha Barks
Drama, Musical, Romance
PG-13
158 Mins

Tom Hooper‘s all singing, all dancing Les Misérables is in a word: long. Based on the musical of the same name by Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg, which was adapted in turn from Victor Hugo‘s 1862 novel, this massively scaled production features a whopping 49 musical numbers that fill the entirety of the film’s 160 minute runtime.

Les Misérables charts the 33 year transformation of Jean Valjean from convict to factory owner to adoptive parent as he runs from the shadow of his former self and uptight lawman, Inspector Javert, in search of redemption.

Hooper experimented with the novel idea of recording all the songs “live.” Instead of going the traditional route of pre-recording songs in a studio and lip-singing along for the feature, all of the songs were belted out in front of the camera and used for final cut. This unique approach to the feature film is surely original and allows the actors an unbound freedom to emote in the moment but the end result is extremely uneven.

The film starts strong with some outstanding acting and powerful musical numbers but immediately illuminates an obvious fact: some of the performers pipes aren’t quite up to snuff.
From the opening number, “Look Down,”  the vocal capacity of Hugh Jackman seems limited. Although he’s no stranger to musical theater- he won a Tony for “The Boy from Oz” in 2004- he just doesn’t possess the power and intensity to fit the bill of the trumpeting ballads of Jean Valjean. Don’t get me wrong, Jackman is a terrific actor and has a palpable intensity burning behind his eyes but he’s just not a terrific singer and that’s all this film is about.

Most insulting however is Jackman’s unorthodox handling of the revered tunes he’s handling. It’s one thing to adjust a piece of music in order to make it seem more natural and suiting for the silver screen but he so drastically alters the melodies and time signatures that few of the pieces he performs actually feel like songs. To call it butchery isn’t a far stretch.

Another questionable bit of casting is Russell Crowe who fills the shoes of the least empathic law officer alive- Inspector Javert. Crowe again is a top notch thespian but his singing capabilities failed to impress. He didn’t go out of a ten note range and everything from him sounded flat and spark-less. For a character  written with a drastic arc, he just wasn’t very compelling and I felt little to nothing towards him for the entirety of the film.

On the other end of the spectrum is the stirring Anne Hathaway. It’s no wonder why the trailer for the film features Hathaway’s powerful rendition of “I Dreamed a Dream” as it is both the emotional and musical climax of the entire film. She jolts life and chills into the number with an intoxicating finesse and has all but solidified her position as front runner for Best Supporting Actress.
However once her little ditty is over, no other piece of acting or singing ever quite reaches those highs again…and this is only thirty or so minutes in.

Entering it’s second act, the film begins to drag on and by the final act it’s running on fumes. Jackman’s acting with the eyes technique grows tiresome and his apparent lack of musical timing becomes more and more egregious especially in light of Hathaway’s triumph.

The final 100 minutes is rounded out by a number of supporting cast that are equally hit or miss.

Amanda Siegfried, who plays Valjean’s adopted daughter Cosette, suffers from an egregious case of Snow White syndrome, peddling a grating soprano that wears thin in her mere introductory moments. Her lover counterpart Marius, played by Eddie Redmayne, however offers a moving performance and actually does his tunes justice as does his secret admirer, Eponine (Samantha Barks.)

The consistent saving grace of the film though is the delightful pairing of Sacha Baron Cohen and Helena Bonham Carter as a duo of slimy innkeepers turned sewer rats. Although their singing isn’t top notch by any standard, they never were expected to be and they crank up the comic relief, offering it up in generous heaps.

What it all boils down to is a picture without a man at the reins. Hooper quite obviously had massive aspirations but I can’t help but feel that they got away from him time and time again. If you’re executing a strictly musical adaptation of a widely known piece go with actors who can kill it in the vocal department. Crowe and Jackman were quite obviously miscast as the leading men and largely lack the chill factor that makes these musicals actually work. Everything is cracked up to 11 but there is the no backbone tying everything together.

Ultimately, Tom Hooper’s experimental Les Misérables is a jigsaw of performances with no central momentum that is both exhaustive and exhausting.

C

” The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey”
Directed by Peter Jackson
Starring Martin Freeman, Ian McKellan, Richard Armitage, Elijah Wood, Ian Holm, Hugo Weaving, Cate Blanchett, Christopher Lee, Andy Serkis
Adventure, Fantasy
169 Mins
PG-13

With The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, director Peter Jackson has bitten off more than he can chew. Jackson has to reinvest his audience with a new and somewhat minor quest while introducing an entirely novel and risky technological advancement, a task that he ultimately fails.

The Hobbit details the journey of hobbit Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman), wizard Gandalf (Ian McKellen) and a company of dwarves led by warrior prince Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage) as they embark towards the conquered dwarf palace carved into the Misty Mountainsto reclaim a vast treasure stolen by the malevolent dragon, Smaug. The travelers encounter one misplaced affair after another and between the orcs, wargs, mountain trolls, storm giants, goblins, a mysterious necromancer and disapproving elves, the tale feels overstuffed and a little inorganic.

With so much going on, it sometimes becomes languid and monotonous but the visual effects, character and set design, and lavish costumes create a stunning backdrop for the tale to unfold which is even more pronounced when seen in high-frame rate 3D.

The advent of high frame rate — 48 frames per second (FPS) — technology came on the heels of complaints that 3D films shot at the industry standard (24 FPS) are shutter strobed when the camera is panning, particularly during action sequences. But do the consequences of higher frame rates outweigh the positives?

The answer is… kind of. 48 FPS presents a hyperrealism that makes camera adjustments completely unnoticeable but is distracting to the inaugural eye and, at times, uncomfortably jarring.
In scenes where characters are talking, or more notably, writing, their gestures seem unnaturally accelerated and physically inconsistent. At best, this goes unnoticed and at its worst, looks like a hi-def home video shoot.

During the action sequences though, it works brilliantly. Every blade swing is crystal clear, every slain goblin sprawling from a cliff is beautifully articulated and the sweeping camera movements create sequences that seem painterly in their scope and motion.

People typically resist tech advancement at first, from the use of commercial airplanes to iTunes updates, so it’s hard to say what the real value of this technology is. Is a commercial and critical backlash symptomatic of a natural resistance to the new or is this a more definitive rejection?

One thing is clear, it’s going to take some adjustment for the uninitiated to accept high frame rate films, a process that isn’t going to happen overnight.

But technology is not the only thing on display here and unfortunately the story can be, at turns, equally lackluster and divisive.

Whereas The Lord of the Rings was surprising touching, its emotional resonance is almost entirely absent here. The bond of the original fellowship rendered the trilogy a record-breaking 11 Oscar wins (The Return of the King) but there is little earned about the relationships in this prequel.

The hefty troop of dwarves are more caricatures than fleshed-out people and the return of Gandalf, played by McKellen, is disappointingly amiss. The inimitable light has gone from his eyes as it has from the series itself.

While a handful of cameos from familiar faces may stir nostalgia for the original triad, it rarely serves the film effectively. An introductory scene that features a glimpse of a virginal Frodo is fine but entirely unnecessary to the plot of this tale. Freeman (Sherlock) however is perfectly cast as Bilbo and remains the most promising aspect of this film’s journey.

The standout of the film though is the glorious return of Gollum, played with wit and panache by series regular Andy Serkis (The Lord of the Rings, Rise of the Planet of the Apes). While Bilbo may be stealing Gollum’s precious ring, Serkis is stealing the scene.

While nothing here is egregious, The Hobbit fails to live up to the massive heights of one of the greatest film trilogies of all time. Although it’s better than your average blockbuster both in terms of its visual razzle-dazzle and plotting, it isn’t destined to join the ranks of unforgettable classics.

The end product is a loose hodgepodge of scenes, many of which could have been left for the blu-ray extended editions. Had Jackson focused more on storytelling and thoughtful character development, The Hobbit would have become a much tighter and purposeful film.

C