You can't help but laugh throughout most of this movie when you sit down to watch it, provided you actually can endure sitting through it. This is another wonderful movie production from The Asylum, and given the title of the movie "Age of the Hobbits", though I can't start to fathom how come the movie's original title "Clash of the Empires" managed to mutate into "Age of the Hobbits", aside from a lame attempt to cash in on the recently released Peter Jackson movie "The Hobbit", because this movie has absolutely nothing to do with hobbits in any sense of the word.
What went through the minds of the people at The Asylum when this movie was dished out of the creative think-box? Let's go to wonderful Indonesia, round out a heap of little people and make a semi-fantasy movie that is set somewhere in between ancient time when men were just beyond Neanderthal stage and a world with dragons and other gargantuan creatures (lizards and spiders). Seriously? But it actually works out, because it is so hilarious to watch that the movie actually grows on you.
Let's start with the people in the movie. There is a lot of little people on the cast list, and there is nothing wrong with that. But their speech is dubbed into English with a thick American accent. I didn't know that they spoke picture-perfect American in Indonesia 12,000 years ago. But I guess I was proved wrong. For some reason, then the 'enemies' of the heroes of the movie all looked like Neanderthals and were less intelligent as well. You just had to love the unibrow that they all had and the wonderfully fake teeth.
Then there were Christopher Judge and Bai Ling. What were they thinking, taking on a production project like this. Are they not familiar with the previous work of The Asylum? Or are the line of work for actors in Hollywood that far pressed? Regardless, I can only guess or wonder, and it is not really my place to question this. I was just at a loss to see these two people in this movie. Normally Bai Ling do manage to perform fairly well in movies, but her performance in this movie was just awful.
The fight scenes were adequate at times, but then there were moments where it was painfully staged and horribly executed by the performers.
But take this movie for what it is, a hilarious production from The Asylum, and as usual, you know what you are getting yourself into with this movie and their usual stuff. It should be said that The Asylum manages to spew out the occasional great movie once in a blue moon, "Clash of the Empires" (or "Age of the Hobbits") was not one such star moment. Far from it.
What really worked for the movie was the spectacular landscapes and wilderness surroundings in which the movie was shot. Plus, the hilarious entirety that is the movie.
