Kyle Smith

Kyle Smith

Movies

Bored of the Rings: ‘Hobbit’ franchise stretched thin

It’s December again, and you know what that means: Yet another “Lord of the Rings” movie. If you enjoyed the first 15 episodes, get ready to spend more quality time with a gang of smelly little dwarves, nauseating trolls and warped hairy ogres. But enough about the crowd lining up for the first midnight screenings Thursday evening.

In “The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug,” a k a “The Hobbit 2,” the dwarves, their mascot Bilbo and their scoutmaster Gandalf are all back for another three-hour nature hike that jogs along with all the excitement of a trip down the New Jersey turnpike, with nothing remotely as scary as that medieval meat left drying indefinitely under the heat lamp at the Nathan’s at Exit 8.

To borrow the title of the Harvard Lampoon’s 1969 spoof, I’m bored of the rings.

Sure, there was a lot of entertainment value to the original “Lord of the Rings” trilogy —particularly the slam-bang third episode “Return of the King.” But I just can’t get excited about sitting through another evening of sameness now that the saga is at the 15-hour mark.

Even dwarves such as Thorin Oakenshield (played by Richard Armitage, foreground, with his co-stars) are likely bound to think this bloated film series comes up short.

Everything gets old when you’ve had enough of it.

“The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring” came out in 2001, and the sound of fanboy salivation hasn’t let up for a moment since. Easy, lads — your god is a false one. Director Peter Jackson is happy to take your loot and add it to his Smaug-like treasure dungeon, but he’s actually a fell necromancer whose mission is to slay your time.

Why else would he have decided to stretch what was originally going to be two “Hobbit” films into three — using the appendices from J.R.R. Tolkien’s book. The appendices!

Yet Jackson can do no wrong with this lot, even when he inexplicably turned things up to 11 in filming last year’s “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey,” which was released in otherworldly, strobe-y, epilepsy-inflaming 48 frames per second.

Hey, assumed Jackson, 48 must be twice as good as 24, right? But you can’t put ten pounds of boring in a five-pound sack.

Jackson more or less responded with the Jesse Pinkman Defense: “Science!”

“Nobody is going to stop,” he threatened in an interview with EW last year. “The technology is evolving,” he promised. He practically added, “We loves the precious.”

Except the audience came out of the movie they paid 18 bucks or so to see wondering, “How can a megabucks production look as cheap as that 1983 videotape of ‘Brideshead Revisited’ I once bought at Goodwill for 50 cents?”

This year’s “The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug” is being shown mostly in 24 frames per second. “No other filmmaker has adopted” 48 fps, the Hollywood Reporter declared last month.

Back at normal speed for the sequel, we’re free to notice how cheaply Jackson values our time. Three sprawling three-hour movies out of one tidy 320-page fairy tale? How does he expect us to stay off Twitter that long?

Three hours in 2013 is not like three hours when Charlton Heston was wearing sandals. Stuff happens a lot faster these days. In three hours, you could miss the entire run of the latest MSNBC talk show. In three hours, you could miss eight or nine increasingly anxious texts from your girlfriend (not that anyone going to a “Hobbit” movie has one of those). In three hours you could stagger out of the theater irrevocably behind on your Justin Bieber scandals.

Martin Freeman as Bilbo Baggins in “The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug.”

But I digress. (Much like Jackson.)

Somewhere in the epic “The Hobbit 2: More Hobbitier Than Ever,” it emerges that the gang is on a quest for a large white gem called the Arkenstone that’s lost in the pile of treasure being sat upon by the dragon Smaug in the middle of Lonely Mountain.

Bilbo intends to snatch a diamond from underneath this fire-breathing dragon’s claws while his band of dwarves plans to pay for the rock in blood: This movie is basically a three-hour jaunt to Kay Jewelers, only in this one every kiss begins with slay.

And that’s just it. The problem with J.R.R. Tolkien’s hairy-toed Wagner plagiarism is that it’s all been there, slain that.

It’s almost like Jackson is milking this thing, continuously trotting out greatest hits from the previous movies only to provide extra run-time padding.

You just know that there will be the usual gallery of magical but familiar figures — dragons, winged or hairy beasts — who come in to be gawped at and then depart, along the lines of the canine-like wargs and elephantine mumakil from Jackson fantasy films of yore.

And remember that unemployed former dreamboat Orlando Bloom? (Most recent screen credit: sixth billing in the 2011 B-movie “The Three Musketeers,” below Matthew Macfadyen, Ray Stevenson and other names you don’t know.) He’s back to playing Legolas, even though Legolas isn’t in the novel and no explanation is given for why, if this is a prequel that takes place many years before “The Fellowship of the Ring,” he somehow pulled a Benjamin Button and managed to be middle-aged before he was young.

News flash, Peter Jackson: No one cares about Orlando Bloom anymore.

As if that weren’t enough, Jackson has even taken it upon himself to make up characters out of whole cloth — because, you know, that stretches things out even longer!

Hence, you get Tauriel, an orphaned she-elf played by Evangeline Lilly, who serves the purpose of romantic interest while flirtatiously frolicking about her people’s Keebler-style woodland kingdom.

So why in the world do we all play along? What Jackson has been delivering in theaters has been one interminable, undisciplined Director’s Cut after another. We’d all be better off waiting for the Viewer’s Cut, the inevitable YouTube mash-up that condenses the three “Hobbit” movies to 20 minutes. Maybe with a peppy little Lorde song or two to back it up.

Jackson’s already in post-production on “The Hobbit 3: A Hard Hobbit to Break,” but who’s to say he won’t fall so in love with every scene he shot that he finds a way to make two movies out of it? Would it matter if he did? This series could go on the way it’s going indefinitely.

At one point in “Smaug,” when the hobbit and the dwarves are high on some kind of spidery forest ganja (they act like they’ve been J.R.R. tokin’), they completely lose focus on everything that’s been happening so far.

“We’ve been going in circles!” someone cries.

Yeah. We noticed.