Cumberbatch's increasing fanbase among the young female filmgoing community also amuses me slightly bearing in mind that I still always think of him as the uptight quizmaster Patrick in "Starter for Ten" (still my favourite of his performances to date - his array of jumpers in that film are a darn sight scarier than anything you'll see Smaug do). But anyone who read the comments on youtube underneath the various Desolation of Smaug trailers would have to conclude that he is now a bona fide sex symbol. One particularly enthused "talk backer" announced gushingly that "Orlando is no longer the hottest person in The Hobbit". Poor old Orlando. Little did he know, in his LOTR heyday, that ten years hence his former fans would be dropping him like a stone in favour of a fifty foot scaly reptile with extremely dodgy breath!
Luckily Cumberbatch is as talented as he is busy, and his vocal performance as the gleefully malevolent dragon Smaug in The Hobbit 2 is one of the highlights of the film. A number of reviewers have compared him to George Sanders in The Jungle Book, but in truth Smaug is so gloriously evil that he makes Shere Khan look like Garfield. I suspect that in years to come his performance will be viewed alongside Sanders as Shere Khan and Jeremy Irons as Scar in the Lion King as one of the great villainous voice performances in film history (I have no idea why it is that an African lion, an Indian tiger and a dragon from another world all speak with silky posh English accents but anything else would seem somehow inappropriate).
Looking back on last year's review of The first Hobbit film, An Unexpected Journey, I think that because I felt that the savaging the film received from a lot of critics was unfair, I probably erred slightly too much on the side of putting a positive spin on the film's undeniable faults. So (says he, indulging himself in a pretentious rhetorical question), has Peter Jackson now fixed the various aspects of the franchise which the critics felt to be "broke"? The answer is "up to a point".
Firstly, the negatives. Leaving aside my mother's (entirely fair) criticism that "the dwarves could do with getting themselves haircuts", my biggest irritation with the film is that there are still too many sodding Orcs milling around. Moreover, the script is still pretty heavy handed, and Jackson & co's spatial awareness appears to be getting worse and worse. I have lost count of the number of times Bilbo and company should have died by this point, although at least we haven't had as many gratuitous "he fell off the cliff so he must be dead...waily waily waily...oh no, there he is" sub-plots which LOTR was riddled with (only one of which appeared in the book).
I was also underwhelmed by Gandalf's sub-plot (OK we get it, Sauron is coming back, we know that because we have already seen the trilogy set 60 years later in which he...comes back!) Ian McKellen is never anything less than a joy to watch (and I am particularly enjoying the fact that his pronunciation of "enemy" sounds more like "enema" with every passing film, which may go some way to explain his pained expression when he comes out with lines like "the enema is gathering in strength"). But basically all the poor chap gets to do in this film is wander around various ruins until he finds one which is haunted by an angry blob of darkness, which then proceeds to kick the crap out of him.
The Azog the Defiler storyline was surplus to requirements in An Unexpected Journey, but I was willing to forgive it on the basis that Jackson at least allowed the storyline fit around the bits that were taken from the book (which stuck pretty close to Tolkien's original work). In DoS, by contrast, entire sequences of the book are being rewritten to fit around the extra "Orc-y" bits.
In particular I felt that Beorn, the chap who lives in the woods and turns into a bear, was rather hard done by by the script. I didn't mind that his look was rather different from the big burly black bearded character in the book, presumably to avoid too many "Hagrid" comparisons. His new look was, er, creative (think Chewbacca if he decided to go for a full body shave but was interrupted halfway through and whisked off to an 80s era David Bowie concert) but I didn't mind it too much and I LOVED the design of his house. I also liked the fact that actor Mikael Persbrandt gave the character an interesting Nordic feel. Persbrandt is quite famous in his native Sweden for playing maverick cops and sharing a snog with Le Chiffre from Casino Royale in the film "Nu" (which is definitely not a biopic of the Teletubbies' vacuum cleaner, and if you thought you would never get to enjoy the spectacle of a Bond villain kissing a were-bear, you were sorely mistaken!)
But the poor chap only gets one scene in his human form, and not a single line taken from the book (all jettisoned in favour of yet more..."ooh, that Azog the Defiler's a bit of a dick" dialogue), which seems a little stingy when one considers how many dwarf songs we had to sit through in the previous chapter. True, that is still one scene more than Tom Bombadil got, but whereas Bombadil was always going to be a tricky character to translate onto the big screen (think Sir Harry Secombe on LSD) Beorn is a character who can really cut loose and kick ass (which is why it is so surprising and disappointing that he is reduced to sitting around and pontificating on the merits of veganism instead). Hopefully this is something which will be remedied in the final film.
There are also various new characters who get a bit more to do, played by up and coming young actors such as Lee Pace (Thranduil the Elven King, an intriguing and more morally ambiguous character than any of the other elves we have come across to date but handicapped slightly by a totally unnecessary disappearing scar and mannerisms which are uncannily similar to those of Matthew Macfadyen as Mitchell and Webb's pompous boss in the recent excellent BBC series Ambassadors) and Luke Evans (Bard the Bowman, who speaks with a Welsh accent just as he did in the BBC Radio version). One review I read got slightly confused between the two of them and indicated that Lee Evans had been cast as the Elven King, which would have been a sight to behold, but fortunately we are not completely bereft of British comedy legends, as Stephen Fry does make an appearance, as an STD-riddled version of Lord Melchett from Blackadder. Apparently next year's film will also feature Billy Connolly riding a giant pig!
Then of course there is Tauriel, the female elf who was conspicuously absent from the book. This is one of the "new bits" which I actually don't have a problem with and Evangeline Lilly manages to shine in the role despite the inclusion of an extra "elf-dwarf" love storyline with Kili, which is dealt with extremely clunkily, including a not particularly Tolkienic line about the contents of a dwarf's trousers (Romeo and Juliet, this ain't).
Notwithstanding the above I did thoroughly enjoy the film. The pace, which was perhaps the biggest problem of all with An Unexpected Journey, has picked up considerably here, as has the palpable sense of excitement and danger. The performances are pretty much universally excellent. The barrel sequence is an Indiana Jones-esque delight, especially when Bombur briefly turns into a "ninja Obelix". I didn't even mind Orlando Bloom shoehorning his way into it, in fact this is the first time for a while when I have actually been glad to see him. He still does that constipated face whenever he tries too hard to act, but he is clearly glad to be back in the green and "stunting around", and his enthusiasm is infectious.
And I have to come back to Smaug, for it is he, not Martin Freeman's increasingly heroic Bilbo nor Richard Armitage's grumpypants Thorin, who is the true star of the film. The final sequence, where he chases the dwarves around the Lonely Mountain before they mount the most expensive assassination attempt in cinema history by trying to melt a several hundred foot high solid gold statue of a dwarf onto him (think of how many schools and hospitals could have been built instead!), is both completely preposterous and utterly thrilling. Can't wait to see the dragon wreaking some serious havoc next year. And Billy Connolly riding that pig, obviously.
Sherlock
One thing I was hoping for in the scenes between Martin Freeman's Bilbo and Cumberbatch's Smaug was some sort of Sherlockian in-joke, bearing in mind that both actors appear in both "franchises". Peter Jackson is no stranger to the in-joke, as one of Sean Bean's first lines in LOTR was "still sharp" (or "still Sharpe" - there are also four or five references to Alec Trevelyan from Goldeneye seamlessly incorporated into the extended edition!) But if there was an in-joke I didn't spot it.
There was however no shortage of in-jokes in the first episode of Sherlock Season 3, the episode in which we finally, after an extremely tense two year wait, found out how Sherlock managed to fake his own death by plunging off St Bart's hospital. In fact, the whole thing could be argued to be one big in-joke at the fans' expense. Part of me was hoping he would just announce that he had been wearing a bouncy rubber suit, wink at the camera and get on with the show (or announce that he was in fact an indestructible scaly dragon in a Benedict Cumberbatch mask) just to hear the howls of online outrage.
As it happens, not all of the fans were satisfied, as the show's writers teasingly offered us not one but three possible explanations. "Which one is true?" screamed the fans. The fact that two of the explanations were clearly intended to be ridiculous joke explanations and the third was the only plausible one (I use the word "plausible" in the loosest possible sense, obviously) would lead me to throw one of Holmes' most famous lines back at those who are still confused: "When you have eliminated the impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."
So Sherlock is back with a bang, still as brilliant, clever, hilarious and infuriating as its lead character. The opening episode was not without its faults and occasionally went for the cheap laugh at the expense of believability (even by the standards of the exaggerated universe in which Sherlock and pals inhabit). Even if Mrs Hudson did think John was gay, would she necessarily blurt this out, bearing in mind that he clearly brought several girlfriends back to Baker Street in the first two seasons? And whilst it is nice to see the writers acknowledge that Mycroft is actually even smarter than Sherlock, something which was not made clear in seasons 1 and 2 (there was some great dialogue between the two brothers which neatly conflated some exchanges from two of Conan Doyle's original stories, namely The Blue Carbuncle and the Greek Interpreter), surely learning Serbian in a couple of hours would be too much even for that supercilious government operative?
I also felt that, while the original story on which the episode is based (The Empty House) devoted itself more or less equally between Sherlock's return and the actual mystery he had come back to solve, The Empty Hearse concentrated too much on the former, meaning that the ostensible plot of the episode, which consists of foiling a plan by a rogue government minister, who is in fact working for North Korea (as one does) to blow up the Houses of Parliament, was a fairly sketchy and uninvolving affair (not to mention a colossal waste of one of Conan Doyle's best villains other than Moriarty, Colonel Sebastian Moran, who was a sufficiently interesting character to make it into one of George Macdonald Fraser's fantastic Flashman novels, but who is rather boringly reinvented here as the aforementioned rogue minister).
But when there was so much to like, who cares? The script was laced with rapier sharp wit, there were some genuinely touching scenes not just between Sherlock and John but also between Sherlock and Molly and even Sherlock and Lestrade! The TV Sherlock has always been a more amoral, sociopathic character than his literary equivalent and at times I have felt that they have gone a touch too far in that direction, but it is clear from this episode that they are planning to develop the character over time so that he grows into a kinder and more emotional character, in other words, something more than a post British version of Sheldon from the Big Bang Theory. All of which promises to be terrific.
Amanda Abbington is extremely warm and believable as Watson's love interest (as well she should be bearing in mind that she is Martin Freeman's real life girlfriend) and I like the fact that they have allowed her character to be sufficiently generous to share her fiance with Sherlock (the last thing the series needs is another grump like Sergeant Donovan). The cameo by Cumberbatch's parents as Sherlock's surprisingly ordinary mum and dad was also great.
I am a little concerned that the series will struggle to find another villain as enthralling as Andrew Scott's unpredictable (and ever so slightly Graham Norton-esque) Jim Moriarty, but let's see where the next two episodes go. Let's just hope we don't have to wait quite as long for Season 4 - just three episodes per season is practically a form of torture (and I am sure that Messrs Cumberbatch and Freeman could find time in between filming the four hundred other films that they are signed up to in the next few years to squeeze in a bit more Sherlock!)
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