It's unfair the way he inhereted the blame by trying to fix a messed up production.

Bits of it are actually pretty good too, I think a lot of the first film is actually alright. My wife and I recently watched the extended editions and on their own they're broadly decent family films (well 3 is medicore to bad). It's the comparison to lotr that suffers and that largely seems to be a byproduct of messed up production.