By The Butcher
You love ’em, he hates ’em! The Butcher carves up your favourite films, and this week, he applies his sharpened cleaver to 2003’s epic The Lord Of The Rings: The Return Of The King, the close-out entry in one of the most successful and beloved movie series of all time.
With the third (third??!!) season of The Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power about to “drop” on one of the streamers (aaahh, so much choice, so much shit…and so many ads, despite already paying for a subscription), The Butcher was dragged kicking and screaming back to Middle fucking Earth. Why won’t they let us out of this cinematic shithole? I’ve had enough! The mere ads for this new season are driving me nuts!
Look, I’m not a virgin, I’m not living my life in a sad fantasy bubble, and I have an active social life. As such, I’m probably not the target audience for The Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power or any of the other Lord Of The Rings crap, but I’ve seen a lot of it, and it’s all bad, and I’m gonna give you my feelings on this appallingly over-rated rubbish nonetheless.
I could have picked any of the films in this abysmal trilogy to cleaver-ise, but the third installment – The Lord Of The Rings: The Return Of The King – is the most worthy of derision because of its eleven – repeat, eleven – Academy Awards, and its staggering performance at the box office back in 2003. Oh, and the fact that it sucks from beginning to end. That’s an awful lot of suckage too, because this is a bum-numbing heavyweight.
Who makes a movie that is 192-minutes long? Vagrant look-a-like, Peter Jackson, that’s who. This man shouldn’t be arrested by the film police. It’s passed that. He should be arrested by the actual police and punished by being forced to sit through his own movies for all of eternity…which would still only give him enough time to watch the first in the trilogy.
The Lord Of The Rings: The Return Of The King has at least four clear points that could and should have been the end, yet Jackson stumbles on indulgently, and his direction is at times extravagant to the point of distraction. I can’t decide whether the characters are more annoying than the actors, or vice versa.
I’m used to being completely underwhelmed by Orlando Bloom, but while playing the potentially cool Legolas, he becomes charisma’s arch-enemy. As for the pint-sized hobbits…well, they need a human-sized slap. Even more frustrating are the usually brilliant Sir Ian McKellen and Bernard Hill, who should know better than to put their names to this kind of tripe.
Considering the passion that this film generates, I should probably expect death threats. If only you fan boys and girls spent as much time in the real world as you do worshipping elves and pixies, you might find yourself with a date on Friday night instead of staying up until 5:00am watching the “holy” trilogy, or one of its laborious spin-offs, prequels or cartoon things. Get. A. Life.
