The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies sees Peter Jackson’s adventures in Middle Earth go out with a bang

REVIEW: The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies is a fitting reward for sitting through the first sluggish instalments of Peter Jackson’s trilogy.

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (M)

Director: Peter Jackson (Lord of the Rings trilogy)

Starring: Martin Freeman, Richard Armitage, Lee Pace, Orlando Bloom, Evangeline Lilly.

Rating: 4 stars

The third time is a precious charm

Five years in the making. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent. 330 minutes of screen time have come and gone.

And now, we are finally here: Peter Jackson’s epic trilogy based on The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien is finally ready to unveil its grand finale.

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Those who resisted the urge to kick the Hobbit habit during those agonisingly sluggish first two episodes will be rewarded with all the sprawling spectacle and grandiose drama they can possibly handle.

The opening act is a welcome surprise, setting both a pace and a standard of visual flair that will be maintained all the way to the closing credits.

Events kick off in dazzling fashion, with the duplicitous Smaug (voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch) given one last chance to strut his stuff as a dragon of mass destruction.

Hobbit forming ... Lee Pace in The Hobbit The Battle of the Five Armies.

A 15-minute stretch where a swooping, gliding and dive-bombing Smaug unleashes his complete fiery arsenal on the village of Lake-town ranks as one of the finest sequences ever composed by Jackson as a filmmaker.

In the period of relative quiet following this electrifying declaration of intent, Jackson proceeds to marshal all the disparate characters and sub-plots that often felt so random in the earlier Hobbit pictures.

Now, finally, everything makes sense, and with this newfound sense of clarity on a storytelling front comes an emotional weight and depth that are the equal of Jackson’s Oscar-winning last hurrah for Lord of the Rings.

Cool hand Luke ... Luke Evans in The Hobbit’s finale.

The skirmish destined to bring together the five armies namechecked in the title has much to do with the immense reserves of gold and jewels inside Lonely Mountain.

With Smaug now gone, Dwarf commander Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage) has fallen under the greed-driven spell of the treasure.

After going back on his word and laying claim to the massive fortune of Lonely Mountain, Thorin draws the ire of troops allied to Elf King Thranduil (Lee Pace). Of course, the marauding Orcs are most displeased by this turn of events, as are humans now following the heroic lead of Bard the Bowman (Luke Evans).

Everything comes to a head with an extended set-piece battle that deservedly takes up almost an hour of screen time.

The anchor ... Martin Freeman as Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbit.

As mesmerising as the impact of this watershed sequence proves to be, the film ultimately exudes a powerful grip on the viewer because Jackson never lets lose sight of each character’s plight amidst the mayhem.

The anchoring presence of the entire film is Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman), no longer the meek onlooker he once was when first persuaded to throw in his lot with the Dwarves.

Overall, this is rollicking, rousing and unforgettable entertainment, which belatedly justifies the slogging terms on which the series began.

In fact, the closing minutes of this appointment with The Hobbit amount to a genuinely movie experience, as we finally bid a bittersweet goodbye to Bilbo and his friends.

Originally published as The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies sees Peter Jackson’s adventures in Middle Earth go out with a bang