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You have the sense of Jackson and his team struggling to get a big and unwieldy machine moving again. There are aspects to The Desolation of Smaug that are very clunky, indeed. Making The Hobbit as a three-film trilogy was always going to be a messy endeavour.

Helped by Cumberbatch’s sardonic delivery, Jackson manages to show us Smaug’s narcissism without undercutting the character’s menace. The very idea of loquacious dragons invokes memories of old British TV Listerine ads and whimsical Disney films but the scene between Smaug and Bilbo is well-handled. Their verbal jousting – in between moments of fire-breathing – provides the film with its longest sequence in which two characters actually talk together.

Here, his antagonist is Smaug (Benedict Cumberbatch), a very well-spoken and conceited dragon whom he encounters deep inside the Lonely Mountain. In the first Hobbit film, he was pitted against Gollum in a battle of wits. He has an everyman quality that the dwarves lack. The one character here who is given at least some depth and complexity is Bilbo, for whom the journey here is a rite of passage. It starts confusingly, ends abruptly and doesn’t even begin to tidy up all its own loose ends but Smaug still has enough spectacle, sleight-of-hand, action and lyricism to enrapture most viewers. For all its use of 3D and digital technology, this is an old-fashioned romp at heart – a piece of pure cinematic escapism. Jackson gives us rousing, matinee-style action, which rekindles memories both of old Ray Harryhausen creature-driven fantasies and of Douglas Fairbanks swashbucklers. Nonetheless, what makes it palatable is the relish with which it is served up.

With more than a dozen principal characters and a stringy plot that pulls in all sorts of different directions at once, Smaug is sometimes very gristly fare, indeed. It is every bit as difficult to digest as its predecessor. The Desolation of Smaug is the meat in the Hobbit sandwich – the middle part in Peter Jackson’s gargantuan, three-film adaptation of J R R Tolkien’s slender novel.