The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies

Skippable, and it is the thinnest film in either trilogy. The book covers this battle in a few pages, largely because its narrator is unconscious for most of it. Stretched to a feature it becomes a hundred and forty-four minutes of which roughly ninety are one engagement, and the film has almost no story left to tell by the time it starts.

It opens by resolving the previous film's cliffhanger in about ten minutes, which is the clearest possible demonstration of why three films was one too many. Smaug, the best thing in the trilogy, is gone before the title.

Post-production was reportedly still being finished very close to release, and it shows in a digital look that is flatter than either of the others. The armies are weightless in a way Helm's Deep never was, and a sequence on a frozen river has the physics of a video game.

What survives is Thorin. The arc about a man being poisoned by a room full of gold is the one serious idea the trilogy has, Richard Armitage plays it well, and the hallucination sequence in the treasury is genuinely good. The Extended Edition adds twenty minutes of additional battle and an unrated certificate. Watch the theatrical, or stop after the second film and read the last chapters.