The Hobbit: The Desolation Of Smaug

After almost three hours, what have you got? Not a whole lot.

To watch non-stop action and still be bored is a feat director Peter Jackson, who appears to have taken over the J R R Tolkien franchise, may not be proud.

Essentially a Middle Earth road movie with a bunch of dwarfs, plus Bilbo the Hobbit, attempting to reach their old home mountain that was usurped by the great dragon Smaug 10 years earlier becomes tiresome, incomprehensible and guilty of CGI overkill in 3D, which, by the way, isn't worth it.

Hob 1 was up to the standard of The Rings Trilogy, even better perhaps because Martin Freeman as Bilbo is so much better than Elijah Wood as Frodo. Now, in Hob 2, Bilbo has precious little to do until the very end - yes, it does end, well past your bedtime, be warned.

What happens is running, hiding, fighting in twisty forests and designer caves and across awe-inspiring landscapes.

The elves protect the dwarfs from Evil Dead lookalikes (orcs), which means that Orlando Bloom and a new girl who might have been Katniss Everdeen with funny ears carry out impossible feats of archery and seldom stop for breath.

The dwarfs are either Scottish and pessimistic, old and rubbish at hand-to-hand, or good looking and dull. The dialogue has past its sell by ("The darkness is coming; it will spread to every corner of the land") and yet there are moments to savour - Stephen Fry as the Boris Johnson of Laketown and Smaug's conversations with Bilbo, which have the intellectual rigour of a David Mitchell quiz show.

As for Gandalf, he wanders off somewhere and gets into trouble on a cliff top, or is it a cavern? Anyway, he's hanging by his fingernails metaphorically, as are we all.