Not everything is better reheated

The Hobbit is a children's book, short and self-contained (originally).
It does not contain enough material for a 9-hours trilogy.

This movie massively reuses assets from the LotR movies, not only to reduce costs, but also to score sympathy by association.

By necessity, it adds huge amounts of original material. Original, but lackluster.

What it fails to capture is the epic dimension of the previous movie. One of my gripes at the time was treating the dwarf as a comedic sidekick (because, dwarf tossing).
13 times the dwarves (eat your heart out, Snow White), 13 times the tonal dissonance. It's jarring.

As many movies in the decade since, this one oscillates between heroism and deconstructive, meta-"humour".
The joks are predictable and fall flat, taking with them any aspiration to grandeur.
Because heroism is masculine, and we don't like masculinity, do we.

1 point for wokeness, mostly because irresistible urge to introduce 'original' one-dimensional girl-boss characters, and inexplicable ethnic diversity.

Worse shite has been written around Tolkien (Rings of Power, anyone?), but this is tedious, and made somewhat palatable only because of its forebears.