The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies
Warner Bros. Pictures | Release Date: December 17, 2014 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
59
METASCORE
Mixed or average reviews based on 46 Critic Reviews
Positive:
23
Mixed:
22
Negative:
1
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
90
TimeRichard CorlissDec 16, 2014
If The Hobbit doesn't equal the achievement of Jackson's earlier Middle-earth movies -- and, honestly, what could? -- it is still, in sum, a thrilling effort. Read full review
88
Chicago Sun-TimesBruce IngramDec 15, 2014
Fighting — presented with Jackson’s usual double helpings of visual splendor, emotional oomph and low-key comedy — is what Battle of the Five Armies is all about. Read full review
88
ReelViewsJames BerardinelliDec 15, 2014
The best film of The Hobbit's three, this final installment is closer in quality to "The Lord of the Rings" than to its immediate predecessors. Read full review
83
HitfixDrew McWeenyDec 1, 2014
By focusing on a few key emotional arcs instead of making it about every shot being the BIGGEST THING OF ALL TIME, Jackson gives the battle a sense of urgency that builds and ebbs, builds and ebbs. Read full review
80
Wall Street JournalJoe MorgensternDec 18, 2014
Now, thanks to this last film, in 3-D, the pleasure is intense, and mixed with awe. There is majesty here, and not just because we’re in the presence of magnificently regal madness. Read full review
80
EmpireJames DyerDec 1, 2014
A fitting conclusion to Jackson’s prequel trilogy and a triumphant adieu to Middle-earth. Now complete, The Hobbit stands as a worthy successor to The Lord Of The Rings, albeit one that never quite emerges from its shadow. Read full review
80
Total FilmRichard EdwardsDec 1, 2014
Despite the warmongering title, focusing on the action would be doing The Battle Of The Five Armies a disservice. Even at its most talky, it's compelling stuff, reaping the rewards of characters built-up over two-and-a-bit movies (sometimes more), all of them flawed and with a convincing agenda. Read full review
80
The Hollywood ReporterTodd McCarthyDec 1, 2014
The final stretch of The Battle of the Five Armies possesses a warm, amiable, sometimes rueful mood that proves ingratiating and manages to magnify the good and minimize the bad of the trilogy. Read full review
78
Austin ChronicleMarc SavlovDec 17, 2014
The performances have remained continuously excellent throughout The Hobbit trilogy, and they remain so here; likewise Howard Shore’s score, which is particularly righteous – bloodthirsty when it needs to be, keening when a particularly major character is cut down. Read full review
75
Entertainment WeeklyChris NashawatyDec 17, 2014
Like everything else in Jackson's Tolkienland, the buildup to the climactic melee stretches on too long. But when it comes, it's a doozy. Read full review
75
Portland OregonianJeff BakerDec 16, 2014
The "Hobbit" trilogy started slowly and ended with a rush, heroes and villians fighting it out over a mountain of gold. What kid of any age can resist that? Read full review
75
Miami HeraldRene RodriguezDec 16, 2014
OK, Mr. Jackson, you proved your point by landing the finish. Now please, no more Middle-earth, ever. Read full review
75
USA TodayClaudia PuigDec 16, 2014
The final installment of the Hobbit trilogy is the best, featuring more spectacular action scenes as well as the series' most emotionally resonant moments. Read full review
75
The PlaylistDrew TaylorDec 2, 2014
The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies is easily the best film of the new trilogy, more entertaining and energetic and tonally in sync with Jackson's earlier, edgier work, shifting from berserker comedy to abject horror at a moment's notice (and then back again). Read full review
75
Slant MagazineRichard Scott LarsonDec 1, 2014
These films, and Tolkien's entire oeuvre, are most affecting in their depictions of friendship, and the performances here represent plutonic male intimacy in convincing, often moving ways. Read full review
70
The DissolveTasha RobinsonDec 16, 2014
At 144 minutes, Five Armies is the shortest and the least bloated and discursive of the Hobbit films. It’s also the one that relies least on filler material and extra character business, and the one that most earns its moments of outsized, dire drama. Read full review
70
VarietyScott FoundasDec 1, 2014
If none of the Hobbit films resonate with "Rings'" mythic grandeur, it’s hard not to marvel at Jackson’s facility with these characters and this world, which he seems to know as well as John Ford knew his Monument Valley, and to which he here bids an elegiac adieu. Read full review
69
Paste MagazineScott WoldApr 3, 2018
So, then, what makes it the “best” entry? The more severe Rings-tone that Jackson has been attempting to graft on top of the (mostly) whimsical original source makes the most sense here. Also—and at the risk of coming off as pedantic—it’s because, technically, it’s the shortest of the three. Read full review
67
Charlotte ObserverLawrence ToppmanDec 16, 2014
The Hobbit concludes as it began: in a welter of continuous action, with characters who have become archetypes but seldom rise above that level, and with a host of ideas J.R.R. Tolkien didn't put into his short novel. Read full review
63
New York PostKyle SmithDec 16, 2014
It’s adequately visionary, it’s routinely spectacular, it breathes fire and yet somehow feels room-temperature. Read full review
63
Washington PostMichael O'SullivanDec 16, 2014
Jackson’s storytelling at this point is so driven by green-screen trickery and digital legerdemain that he seems to have forgotten about human emotion. Read full review
63
RogerEbert.comSheila O'MalleyDec 16, 2014
There are some wonderful sequences in Battle of the Five Armies, and the attention to detail is breathtaking (each different space rendered with thrilling complexity), but the film feels more like a long drawn-out closing paragraph rather than (like "The Desolation of Smaug") a vibrant stand-alone piece of the story. Read full review
63
McClatchy-Tribune News ServiceRoger MooreDec 16, 2014
It’s the best film of this trilogy, but truthfully, none of the “Hobbit” thirds have been any better than middling “Hunger Games” or “Harry Potter” installments. Considering the vaunted reputation J.R.R.Tolkien enjoys, this overdone “There and Back Again” never quite got us there. Read full review
60
Los Angeles TimesBetsy SharkeyDec 16, 2014
The finale is not an all-out disappointment. It should satisfy the franchise's fans, and it does wrap up any loose ends you might be wondering about. Read full review
60
SalonAndrew O'HehirDec 16, 2014
If I had the power to turn back time and start the tortuous production process that led to the “Hobbit” trilogy over again, with a different director in charge and a completely different approach, I would do it. But that’s precisely the problem with the One Ring, right? Once you put it on you are changed, and those changes cannot be undone. Read full review
60
Arizona RepublicKerry LengelDec 16, 2014
Even though Five Armies is the shortest Hobbit movie, it also is the least thrilling as it chugs toward the finish line weighted down with all the added characters and confusing subplots that have been tacked on along the way. Read full review
60
New Orleans Times-PicayuneMike ScottDec 16, 2014
That's a lot of storytelling going on, and it costs Battle of the Five Armies a certain cohesion. Read full review
60
Village VoiceAlan ScherstuhlDec 2, 2014
The longer versions of all Jackson's Middle-earth films have played better (and made more sense) than their theatrical cuts, but this time he's trimmed out something absolutely vital, the one element that, besides his mad gore-minded grandiloquence, has kept everything together five films running: an attention to the emotional lives of his hobbits. Read full review
60
CineVueJoe WalshDec 1, 2014
Jackson's efforts have peaked and troughed, but this final chapter will undoubtedly satisfy fans, and kindle a sense of sadness as this hobbit's tale finally draws to a close. Read full review
60
Time Out LondonTom HuddlestonDec 1, 2014
Luckily, Jackson’s singular talent for massive-scale mayhem hasn’t deserted him, and the hour-long smackdown that crowns the film gives him ample opportunities to indulge it. Read full review
60
The GuardianAndrew PulverDec 1, 2014
Like Agatha Christie’s detective novels, there would appear little in the way of aesthetic – as opposed to technological – progression; having set the tone so definitively at the outset, each film delivered exactly what it promised. Read full review
50
Rolling StonePeter TraversDec 17, 2014
Talk about beating a dead orc. In dutifully completing his prequel trilogy to his three-part Lord of the Rings triumph, director Peter Jackson has sadly saved the worst for last. Read full review
50
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)John SemleyDec 17, 2014
Five Armies only feels truly entertaining when it embraces the arch silliness of its material; like when 92-year-old actor Christopher Lee whirls about in combat with a handful of ghosts. Read full review
50
Philadelphia InquirerSteven ReaDec 17, 2014
If you want to see a Renaissance faire turned into an apocalyptic battlefield, this is the ticket. Read full review
50
The New York TimesNicolas RapoldDec 16, 2014
Bilbo may fully learn a sense of friendship and duty, and have quite a story to tell, but somewhere along the way, Mr. Jackson loses much of the magic. Read full review
50
Chicago TribuneMichael PhillipsDec 16, 2014
By the second hour of The Battle of the Five Armies, the visual approach becomes a paradox: monotonously dynamic epic storytelling. Read full review
50
San Francisco ChronicleMick LaSalleDec 16, 2014
As Bilbo, Freeman is a pleasure to watch to the extent we get to watch him. His timing is brilliant — he gets the movie’s only laughs. He has tremendous sensitivity and an ability to seem like he’s about to say something — and then convey it without saying it. He could have made a great Bilbo. Instead he’s the one thing that has made this trilogy bearable. Read full review
50
St. Louis Post-DispatchJoe WilliamsDec 16, 2014
Whose story is this? There’s an old saying that history is written by the winners. The screenplay for The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies must have been written by elves. Read full review
50
The A.V. ClubA.A. Dowd Dec 16, 2014
Bilbo fades into the sidelines of his own movie, and that may be why the mournful finale of Battle feels so canned, like a roiling tide of crocodile tears. Eleven years ago, Jackson earned the fond, seemingly endless farewells of The Return Of The King. His Hobbit series has only one ending, and it comes not a moment too soon. Read full review
42
Tampa Bay TimesColette BancroftDec 16, 2014
Turns out we were right to wonder. The first film based on The Hobbit was charming fun, the second pretty good, too. But The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies is a film too far, tedious and overlong and short on most of the elements that made the first two work. Read full review
40
SlateJonathan L. FischerDec 18, 2014
Rather than having too much pure Tolkien, it offers too much pure Jackson. It may occasionally seem to be aware of its undiluted preposterousness, but that hardly eases the experience of sitting through its endless cartoonish action sequences and overwrought emotional payoffs. Read full review
40
New York Magazine (Vulture)Bilge EbiriDec 17, 2014
The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies feels thoroughly inconsequential — a bloated, portentous mess that, in a just world, should not exist. Read full review
40
New York Daily NewsJoe NeumaierDec 16, 2014
There’s far too many moments of sabre-rattling, and too much confusion about who is aligned with whom, and why. Those who know and love Tolkien’s texts will have a vested interest. Everyone else may grow restless. Read full review
40
TheWrapInkoo KangDec 1, 2014
The 144-minute running time showcases Jackson's worst tendencies: eons-long battle scenes, sloppy and abrupt resolutions, portentous romances, off-rhythm comic timing, and, newly in this case, patience-testing fan service. Read full review
40
The TelegraphTim RobeyDec 1, 2014
The trouble is that Jackson can’t make it mean very much: when every life on Middle Earth is seemingly at stake, few individually grab our attention. Read full review
38
Boston GlobeTy BurrDec 16, 2014
Jackson has marched the modern fantasy-action epic into a thundering blind alley; the movie exhausts your senses without ever engaging your imagination. Read full review
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