As Peter Jackson said, you cannot just take a book a film it. That has never worked and never will.
Many characters where left out or changed and thier deeds or 'feel' etc filled in by other characters. Just look at the changes required in the first film to speed up the journey to Bree, no Bombadill, no months waiting and planning with Merry etc from the start, all knowing what the ring can do, no missing note from Gandalf at the Prancing Pony, the list is pretty long!
I agree that Two Towers has a changed feel from Fellowship, but the two books are radically different and the change is supposed to be there.

The review from the SunTimes link was pathetic and left me wondering if the reviewer had actually even read the books. He was complaining that it was like an action movie, not a story of modest hero hobbits. Hello, this is now a war story with one epic battle after another, inflicting layers of pain, suffering and desperation, not the innocence of the fellowship.
How else will all the characters be so affected by the events as they are in the book if they do not get knee deep in orc blood? These are the events that change Merry and Pippin into soldiers, turns Aragorn into a king, makes and Elf and a Dwarf into friends and affects Frodo so much that he goes with the elves in the end, all innocence gone.

Folk seem to be getting very confused as to what this film was about, don't forget that the books told the Frodo/"Everyone else" story separately in each book to the exclusion of all else to emphasize the separation between the two equally valid struggles. This just wouldn't work on film.

Last bits, Faramir only just let them go, so is still a proven good guy in that at least he was able to do, in the end, what Boromir could not. And his eventual reward will be punishment. I agree that taking them into Gondor was wierd. Don;t understand that.

After all the rambling. Overall, I though it was a pretty good movie, go see it.