Essentially every character with the possible exceptions of Boromir, Pippin and Sam have been totally undermined by the movies. Gandalf is half-mad in the first film. I mean, jumping out from behind a door in the middle of a storm and screaming "Is it safe?" at the top of his voice? Catch a grip! He's lucky poor Frodo didn't drop dead of fright on the spot.
Boromir of course was an annoying little tick in the book as well as the film and actually seemed slightly better in the film. Although, this may have been the casting; Sean Bean has more charisma in his little finger than Figgy Mountainback has in his whole body.
Frodo is constantly let down in the first film by having other characters interfere in his story (both Arwin and Aragorn) leaving it as a mystery why anyone would have as much faith in him as Gandalf seems to. In TTT he makes it even worse by acting like an idiot and showing the Ring to the Nazgul. Luckily, the Nazgul and Faramir are idiots too and let him wander off into Mordor without any further ado.
Aragorn just seems a bit of a drip; Logolas has the magical ability to transform himself into a CGI effect at will and Gimli has some sort of masturbation fetish.
Saruman's character, apart from becoming a class-A breakdancer, is sidelined to the point of wondering why he was in either of the first two films at all.
Galadriel suffers from whatever disease Legolas has, but at even less quality so she can only manipulate her own colour palette under stress.
Elrond has spent 8000+ years waiting for the chance to destroy Sauron and now that the chance has come he's utterly depressed and wants to run away. So much for the host of the last homely house and the last of the great lore-masters.
Gollum looks and sounds too much like Peter Lorrie and is generally not quite nasty seeming enough. Generally, though, he's not done too badly.
The first two films are utter, utter rubbish except visually. As a slideshow of Middle Earth's tourist attractions I can't imagine them being bettered. As a representation of the story they are worse than worthless. The thought that millions of people will think that this load of tripe was what JRRT wrote is an insult to his memory.
The worst thing is that all Jackson had to do was film the damn books. It was all there: he just had to compress and maybe re-order some events to make it filmable. But instead he started adding extra bits. And for every minute of new material we lost a minute of original material. The whole side-trip to Osgiliath was wasted time and budget; it advanced the plot not one iota while at the same time makeing Frodo, Faramir, and the Enemy look stupid. Likewise the embarrassing fight between Gandalf and Sauron and the tragicly unfeasible ending to the Seige of Helm's Deep which actually prompted some laughter in the cinema I saw it in.
Over and over again changes that achieved nothing were introduced and so we lost the Old Forest and the Dismissal of Saurman, the full Mirror of Galadriel, the Black Breath, the Ent's revenge on the Orcs, the Scouring of the Shire, not to mention some interesting material from UT that could have been included (eg, the Lord of the Nazgul's dealings with Wormtounge and Saruman).
In a word: "Bah!"
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