The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies

Late in this third and final chapter of Peter Jackson's horribly bloated adaptation of The Hobbit, Orlando Bloom's familiar elven warrior is assured, “Legolas, your mother loved you … very much.” Instantly, I backtracked—had the issue of Legolas' mother come up in either of the previous forgettable chapters of The Hobbit? Even if it had, why bring it up now? Just an extra flourish of cheap sentiment to pad out a film built entirely around a battle with nebulous stakes that we could care less about? Or another pathetic attempt to encode The Hobbit into Jackson's cinematic Lord of the Rings cycle? (“Oh, so that's why Legolas was always portrayed as a happy-go-lucky, adventure-loving cipher without any mommy issues—they were already resolved!”) Nothing else to talk about in this long and dismal cartoon, except that I'm reasonably certain there were a lot more than five armies.