If you were to rattle off a handful of the greatest multi-film franchises in the history of cinema, it wouldn’t take long for Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings to come up. On the other side of the coin, were you tasked to list the most disappointing, then the filmmaker’s The Hobbit would surely prove itself worthy of consideration.
A two-film adaptation helmed by Guillermo del Toro was the original plan, and we really wish that was what we ended up getting. Instead, Jackson ended up taking the reins when the Pan’s Labyrinth architect dropped out, and you get the distinct impression he only did so because there was nobody else remotely qualified to handle the job on short notice.
If that wasn’t enough, the studio decided to stretch The Hobbit into a trilogy when production was already underway, and it would be fair to say that it was a pale shadow of its immense predecessor. Money was made, of course, but concluding chapter The Battle of the Five Armies ironically turned out to be both the shortest and worst-reviewed chapter in the entire six-film Middle-earth saga.
At 144 minutes and boasting a 59 percent Rotten Tomatoes score (the only one to drop below the Fresh threshold), you can almost feel the slim source material being stretched across the screen through needless exposition and the Legolas platforming sequence that set the fandom ablaze with its poorly-rendered stupidity. Epic is epic, though, and Netflix users have nonetheless opted to luxuriate in the crushingly dull finale to an all-timer of a feature film journey.
Per FlixPatrol, The Battle of the Five Armies has stuck its sword into Netflix’s global most-watched list, which is strange when there are literally five better entries in the same property to choose from.