[TheMisfortuneTeller]

I spent two hours and forty-come minutes enduring stuff like this:

Bilbo gets an elvish blade handed to him. He tries to beg off receiving it, saying that he doesn't know anything about fighting. Shortly thereafter, he finds himself in the Goblin cave separated from his dwarf companions (he simply crouches down and thousands of goblins walk away without bothering with him). A single goblin, however, somehow catches sight of him and attacks. The two of them have a short, vicious (but well choreographed) knife fight, with Bilbo handling his new weapon like a master swordsman. (this scene appeared in one of the teaser trailers). Then, both Bilbo and the goblin fall down a deep precipice -- yes, that abyss-diving thing again -- after which horrific fall Bilbo gets up uninjured (naturally) and finds himself facing Gollum. The master hobbit swordsman suddenly seems terrified of his little blade as he tries pointing it uncertainly at the strange apparition in front of him.

A really crappy, logically contradictory, and completely unconvincing sequence of scenes.

In another real howler -- one of too many to enumerate them all here -- Gandalf does his magic-exploding-staff trick -- again -- and stuns thousands of goblins just about to dismember thirteen disarmed and captive dwarves. When the lights come back on, we see everyone in the vast cavern lying on the ground, dwarves included. Gandalf then yells: "Arm yourselves! Fight!" whereupon all of them -- dwarves and goblins alike -- get up, arm themselves, and fight. No sense in our heroes just getting the hell out of their predicament while they still had a little darkness to cover their escape. Oh no. Not that. Too much like the book.

As the real Bilbo Baggins might have said, had he a real movie about himself in which to say it: "I don't dislike half this film half as much as I should; and I dislike less than half of it half as much as it deserves."