Lord Of The Rings & Hobbit: 12 BIGGEST Mistakes We Have To Live With
8. Azog Was A Terrible Villain
To be honest, this isn't a desperately good franchise for villains. Saruman is great, but the other named villains are largely forgettable, while main villain Sauron is a disembodied eye for most of it.
The worst example of this issue is Azog the Defiler (Manu Bennett), a massive Orc who served as the main villain of The Hobbit Trilogy. This character is only mentioned briefly in the books, but in the films his role was blown right up - and not in a good way.
In fairness, it's clear why this happened. The characters needed a villain to face while on the road to the mountain, but Azog fell flat overall. He was a very boring, personality-free CGI baddie who did little more than occasionally show up at inconvenient moments to badger the heroes before disappearing again.
He had also killed the father of Thorin (Richard Armitage), the trilogy's leading dwarf, but this backstory and the grudge between Thorin and Azog wasn't explored enough throughout the films.
Overall, Azog the Defiler just didn't work as a villain and given how personality-free most Orcs are, they work well as minions but not necessarily as main antagonists. Perhaps a completely invented, non-Orc villain would've been better here.