The Hobbit Smaug pt 2,or "It's finally over"

 It's finally over.  This movie clocks in at two hours and forty one minutes, though it's only 2.30 if you take out the eleven minutes of credits.  Man, I'm glad I didn't have to sit through all of those waiting to see if there was a teaser at the end of the movie.  I was annoyed enough getting through the dang thing as it was.  So much added and so much changed and for what?  It all reeks of padding to get the "fans" of the movies to shell out even more money.  Just buy the book, you can read it in about the same time it takes to get through these films.

So as I mentioned, it's a really padded movie.  So much has been written about why they added the other stuff that I'm really going to try to not go through it again, no one wants to my added whining to the list.

It's a shame, since it's a waste of a good cast.  And this new character, Tauriel, (Evangeline Lilly) heck, she should have her own action adventure series of movies, 80-90 minutes long, of course.  I'd watch those!  But she's a completely made up character, and not even needed in the movie.  Granted, the only female characters in the book were the spiders, so I'm not opposed to having her in the movie.  I'm surprised they didn't just use Arwen, and then they could get an appearance by Aragorn as well.

Smaug looks pretty good, though making him a wyvern kind of ruins the effect.  He's always been depicted as having four legs and two wings.  Still, there was a lot of the wit lost between him and Bilbo when they added all the dwarves into the mix.  That Cumberbatch guy does a decent job with the voice, but he's no Richard Boone, who did an excellent job in an otherwise tepid 1977 animated version of The Hobbit. 

And of course, there's a complete lack of physics on display here, like all the rest of PJ's movies.  Characters fall from great heights, bounce off the ground and get up with visible damage.  Much like a cartoon.

The fighting is pretty good, as are the effects.  I really wanted to like this movie, and I can't.  I'll watch the final one at some point, I hear it's a bit shorter.