On the one hand they can be criticized for not sticking to the kids' book roots, adding in the extra stuff from the Appendices, adding in the orcs, and playing it up as a serious Lord of the Rings prequel trilogy in a lot of ways. But on the other hand the movie is full of kids' movie madness, with quirky characters (Radagast the Brown) and escapes/resolutions that defy all logic and physics (too numerous to name). I feel as though the movie tried to have it both ways, and both sides of the movie suffered because of it.

That said, it's not as bad as, say, the Star Wars prequels or Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. The kiddie logic of the action scenes is at least coherent and reasonably consistent, and most of it is entertaining. The serious LotR prequel aspects are well done, even if they're compressed to work for a movie. Bilbo, Thorin, Gollum, and Gandalf are all very well done, and Galadriel was neat as well. The dwarf humour was not as over-the-top as I'd feared, and the dwarves are treated with more respect, I think, than they were in the three LotR movies, where Gimli was the comedic relief all the way through.

Overall I'm okay with it, but I wish they had toned down the ridiculousness of the action scenes. I lost track of how many people survived improbable falls, or how many times enemies were defeated by blows that should not have defeated them (the goblins became serous cannon-fodder; at one point all anyone had to do was touch one to kill it). The whole scene with the wargs chasing Radagast made no sense at all, from start to finish. The trolls were slow-roasting the dwarves with dawn about ten minutes away. Yet at the same time, the visuals were pretty great, and there were lots of legitimately cool moments, particularly with Bilbo and Gollum, and with Thorin in the climactic battle. Oh, and the eagles were great, even if getting onto them defied physics again.