It was as exciting as a serial installment should be: it left you hanging, dying for more, but was strangely satisfying in its own right.
It had the perfect balance of action, character development and story pacing. The romance (or lack thereof) has become a manner of inside joke with the audience, but even that, and the movie's humor in general were just so.
Unlike the last few, which suffered from being an unduly truncated rendition of the book, this is an installment exciting enough to bear repeated viewings.