Bard ( Luke Evans) becomes the natural leader of the traumatized refugees, who straggle around dazed at the destruction of their homes. 'The Battle of the Five Armies' picks up where 'Desolation of Smaug' left off: Smaug the dragon (voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch) has burst free into the air, and descends onto the helpless people of Laketown in a blitzkrieg of fire.
There are some wonderful sequences in 'Battle of the Five Armies', and the attention to detail is breathtaking (each different space rendered with thrilling complexity), but the film feels more like a long drawn-out closing paragraph rather than (like 'The Desolation of Smaug') a vibrant stand-alone piece of the story. The film's first mildly humorous moment, a line reading from Martin Freeman, comes almost 40 minutes in, and it's refreshing, but it highlights the humorlessness of the rest. There's not enough Bilbo in 'The Battle of the Five Armies.' The story misses his presence. And where is Bilbo Baggins in all of it? The novel is concise, humorous, with a dark periphery, and even in the midst of extremely tense moments, we have Bilbo, a tut-tutting little homebody, wondering how the heck he got involved in all of this nonsense in the first place.
