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The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies

ELROND has left the building.

It can now be said that while Peter Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy often duplicates the otherworldly magic of his Lords of the Rings triumvirate, it doesn’t match the dense, mythic greatness of the original three.

Battle of the Five Armies constitutes Jackson’s long kiss good night to Middle-earth, wrapping up with a somewhat chaotic but satisfying conclusion. Give Jackson his due: It’s a big job, tying all the threads left from previous Hobbit chapters An Unexpected Journey and The Desolation of Smaug and also interlocking effectively with the Lord of the Rings trilogy to come, chronologically speaking. He does this. And he doesn’t need three-plus hours to do it.

One of this series’ great strengths is Martin Freeman as the diminutive, good-hearted hobbit Bilbo Baggins, a paragon of simple decency in a landscape of shifting loyalties and hidden motivations. This quality is especially important given Bilbo’s alliance with the dwarves to take back the stronghold of Erebor. Once the fiendish dragon Smaug has left that realm’s massive, gold-heaped chambers, dwarf king-in-waiting Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage) unexpectedly transforms from righteous warrior to besieged paranoid — Middle-earth’s Richard Nixon.

Afflicted with gold-lusting “Dragon Fever,” Thorin makes enemies of allies, including the heroic Bard (Luke Evans), the reluctant saviour of Lake-town and the bitchy Elven king Thranduil (Lee Pace).

Rebelling against Thranduil are the arrow-spewing elf warrior Legolas (Orlando Bloom) and renegade elf warrior-woman Tauriel (Evangeline Lilly), whom, you’ll recall, carries a torch for amorous dwarf stud Kili (Aidan Turner).

As in LOTR, the wizard Gandalf (Ian McKellen) is inconveniently absent through much of the action here, held hostage by the Necromancer.

Jackson has never been one to shy away from using all the digital technology at his command, and here, as in the other two films, he tends to go overboard with manic camerawork that swoops, circles and dives. There is so much more to be gained in achieving tension when his camera stays relatively static, as in the death duel — we all know it’s coming — of Thorin and the murderous Orc general Azog (Manu Bennett) on a frozen mountain lake.

The Blu-ray 3D combo pack arrives without extra footage — true fans are advised to hold out till November, when the “Extended Edition” is expected — but with a wealth of bonus material, including Recruiting the Five Armies, a fun look at the extras who suited up to play warriors, and Completing Middle-earth: A Six Part Saga, Jackson’s explanation of how he tried to tie all his Hobbit/Lord of the Rings films together in this grand finale. ***1/2

 

Into the Woods

LONG before Hollywood jumped on the fairy-tale-with-a-twist thing bandwagon (Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters, Maleficent, etc.), Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine did it on Broadway in 1986, and did it really well, with their musical combining the innocence of classic bedtime stories with an overlay of bitter life experience.

Faithfully based on that musical, this film from director Rob Marshall (Chicago) offers a well-considered compression of the stage version, but with a playful sensibility:

• Cinderella (Anna Kendrick) wants to go to the ball along with her wicked stepmother and her awful stepsisters, but it’s instinct, not the stroke of midnight, that compels her to run from the too-charming Prince Charming (Chris Pine).
• Red Riding Hood (Lilla Crawford) is a child who finds herself stalked by an explicitly pedophilic Big Bad Wolf (Johnny Depp), and emerges from the experience changed. (“Isn’t it nice to know a lot!/ And a little bit… not.”)
• Jack (Daniel Huttlestone) is sent by his mother (Tracey Ullman) to sell the family cow, and is conned into trading “Milky White” for a handful of magic beans.
• The beautiful Rapunzel (Mackenzie Mauzy) is a long-tressed beauty kept in a lonely tower, until her sanctum is invaded by another handsome prince (Billy Magnussen).

All these classic tales revolve around a central non-classic story of a humble baker (James Corden) and his wife (Emily Blunt) confronted by a wicked witch (Meryl Streep) who informs them their childless state is a result of a curse she placed on their house long ago. The witch sets the couple on a mission to collect items from those aforementioned figures for a little spell reversal of her own.

Most of the play’s many delights are intact, due to cannily cast musical vets (Kendrick, Corden), just plain movie stars (Depp and Pine) and one revered thespian (Streep). Blunt distinguishes herself with particularly strong work as the Baker’s wife who proves susceptible to another’s charms.

The songs have a certain intricacy that defies the typical show-stopper dynamic of the stage musical. By default, the stand-out is the song Agony, the duet performed by the two princes making the chest-thumping most of their declarations of love. Note how Pine, who always resisted channelling the original Captain Kirk in the Star Trek reboot, chooses this moment to go full-on Shatner.

Blu-ray extras include a deleted song Sondheim wrote specifically for Streep — titled She’ll Be Back — that was supposed to follow Rapunzel’s decision to leave the wicked witch behind. ****

 

The Penguins of Madagascar

SOME cartoon characters are created to make kids laugh. Some are aimed at the parents of the kids.

Skipper, the take-charge, can-do boss penguin of The Penguins of Madagascar, is intended for grandparents.

Whenever he barks a command at his explosives-happy demolition expert Rico, grandma or grandpa might be the only ones to recognize the reference to Robert Stack’s frequent addressing of his second-in-command on the TV series The Untouchables (1959-63).

Skipper is voiced by original Madagascar director Tom McGrath (who actually once tried to cast Stack in the role). He’s an old school kind of commander, the kind you might see in old Second World War movies, and he talks accordingly: “Dial back the moxie, sass-mouth!”

After a prologue explaining the Antarctic origins of the fighting, flippered foursome, we are taken along on a mission to Fort Knox. Let’s just say Skipper has targeted the stronghold to satisfy his taste for a different kind of gold. But the gang are quickly taken hostage by a megalomaniac octopus named Dave (John Malkovich), a cephalopod on a mission to rid the world of penguin-y cuteness.

On the run, Skipper and his crew find themselves saved by a high-tech quartet of heroes who call themselves the North Wind. Their numbers include a seal, a polar bear, and a sexy owl (?!), all led by the self-important husky whom Skipper will call Agent Classified (Benedict Cumberbatch) because, well, he does say, “My name is classified.”

If the Madagascar movies have run their course (and even the penguins herein admit they’re getting desperately sick of that I Like to Move It song), this offshoot takes a diverting path into more fantastical spy movie territory, with an abundance of nice sight gags (love the penguin camouflage bit) and a plethora of groan-inducing puns based on celebrity names. ***

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca