TheMovieVampire’s review published on Letterboxd:
Man, what a misguided endeavor this whole Hobbit thing was. I’ve long maintained that the problems with this spinoff series run a lot deeper than the decision to split it into three movies but out of the three this is definitely the one that suffers most from the padding. It’s something I’ve noticed about a lot of the last parts of these needlessly split movies like The Matrix Revolutions or Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows- Part 2,” they end up feeling like movies that are nothing but extended climactic action scenes rather than actual movies. That’s almost certainly the case with this film, which very quickly gives itself over to endless fighting between CGI armies. Granted these battle scenes have their moments, but there’s nothing here that we couldn’t get out of other fantasy movies really. There are still fewer WTF moments than there were in the first Hobbit movie which is almost certainly the weakest of the three, but nothing here as good as some of the highlights of the second and probably the best (by default) of the three. This one isn’t a painful experience exactly, I guess it passed the time well enough, but man this whole spinoff trilogy’s existence just makes me mad. What a shameless cash-grab.