Stupid Elf Tricks...

[Lalaith]

Essex's initial point is excellent. It doesn't matter if things in the films are silly in the context of our real world, what matters is if they are convincing in the context of the cinematic Middle Earth.
There were things about the films that bugged me deeply but Legolas' action tricks (and Legolas in general) were certainly not among them. I wasn't crazy about the horse-jumping but that was because I thought it looked badly done, technically speaking: it seemed blurred and jumpy. The troll-killing Gurthang points at was a bit blurry too, as I remember.

The shield-surfing looked convincing however, and was actually one of the best bits in TTT, as far as I was concerned. A bit of crowd-pleasing fun which was genuinely funny, as opposed to the demeaning belching routine inflicted on Gimli, which I hated. I didn't think the surfing was "modern," in fact it was rather sweetly old-fashioned, cinematically speaking. Orlando Bloom isn't really an "actor", he's more in the old-school matinee idol mould, like Douglas Fairbanks and Errol Flynn, and his stunts are just part of that tradition.
(Unlike young Mr Bloom who is lucky enough to live an age of computerised assistance, Douglas Fairbanks had to do it all himself: his trademark stunt was descending a curtain or ship sail by putting a sword into it and hanging on as it cut downwards. The sword was secretly bolted into a sliding mechanism behind the fabric, but still, it was an extremely difficult and dangerous trick to manage...)