The End Of An Era

And so we reach the belated, belabored end of our Harry Potter marathon. In this review, I shall package the Yates-directed Deathly Hallows Part 1 and Part 2 as a single film, much as the studio should have done. I will split up my analysis and scores because they are, ultimately, very different films, but neither deserves something as grandiose as a full-length piece.

[EN: The grand conclusion to this marathon came much later than I anticipated, so now instead of a finale for the world of Harry Potter, let’s consider this review a warm-up for the impending release of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them and its battalion of premature sequels.]

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, in case you have been frozen in carbonite for the last 20 years and missed this phenomenon completely, tells the story of seventeen-year-old wizard Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe). Harry embarks upon an epic camping trip with his friends Ron (Rupert Grint) and Hermione (Emma Watson), attempting to hunt down and destroy the remaining Horcurxes of Lord Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes), the mystical objects that contain his shattered soul. Once they’re destroyed, he will no longer be immortal and he can be defeated. This all culminates in a massive battle at Hogwarts, with the forces of Good and Evil fighting for the fate of the wizarding world.

Part 1

Year: 2010

Director: David Yates

Cast: Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, Rupert Grint

Run Time: 2 hours 26 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

You know that cool part of the plot summary about massive battles and good struggling to triumph over evil? That’s not in this one. Deathly Hallows Part 1 devotes the bulk of its time to that most portentous of occasions: wizard camping. While the subject matter is hardly enthralling, promising director David Yates (who directed the two previous, increasingly delightful, films, the best two in the franchise up to that point) does next to nothing with it, and thus Deathly Hallows Part 1 sinks back into the dull muck of the Harry Potter rank and file.

Other than a mysterious penchant for capturing its leading men shirtless on film (science will never satisfactorily explain preteen girls’ illicit fascination with scrawny British kids), Deathly Hallows’ aesthetic has very little going for it. It’s drab and unremarkable, and its two best sequences are the ones that seem to actively yearn to be any other movie than the one it is. The first is an animated sequence that illustrates the titular folk tale (yes, the title references a made-up folk tale, and would you be surprised if I told you the plot was waaaay too bogged down with explorations of wizarding mythology?). The second is a sequence featuring a magical snake that feels like it was transplanted directly from some halfway decent B-horror film. These peculiar flights of fancy briefly enliven the film before it drops once more into its monotonous slump.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not particularly dreadful, and it’s certainly not as wooden and creaky as one Mr. Columbus’ contributions to the franchise. It’s just sort of there. Occasionally a well-choreographed action scene will rear its head, but it’s largely just a peaky mash of conversations in tents, strained teen melodrama, and befuddlingly complex world-building. And even with the remarkably disproportionate run time it’s given, it manages to bungle simple things like actually introducing characters who only readers of the books will fully understand. It’s a lackluster, inauspicious beginning to an end.

Rating: 6/10

Part 2

Year: 2010

Director: David Yates

Cast: Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, Rupert Grint

Run Time: 2 hours 10 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

I always remember Deathly Hallows Part 2 as being the one where things actually happen. Now that I’m coming to it without the breathless anticipation of a lifetime of Harry Potter fandom, I’ve realized that, while this is accurate, the massive swaths of plot regurgitated by the film really don’t hold much meaning.

Deathly Hallows was already a weaker entry in the book series, bogged down by appendixfuls of lore, side quests, and revelations about the history of its characters. It’s J. K. Rowling’s Silmarillion, not necessarily the climactic showdown we’d been waiting for, at least until the very end. Where the film goes wrong is in following that narrative to the letter. If they had been forced to condense this material into just one movie, this could have been avoided, but huge chunks of Part 2 are devoted to endless bone-dry exposition.

The pacing is shot to tatters, and such a large part of the inflated run time is devoted to exactly recreating the worst parts of the book that Yates can barely squeeze in the massive roster of characters who live and die in the climactic Battle of Hogwarts. It sucks all emotion from the film like a Dementor’s Kiss, asking us to weep over the death of characters who only appear for seconds onscreen before their lifeless corpses are draped dramatically across the frame.

Of course, die-hard fans know exactly who these characters are and how they got here, but taken as a piece of cinema it’s nigh-on incomprehensible. The bulk of the film is taken up with a massive battle that is admittedly a worthy spectacle of flash-bang special effects and indiscriminate mayhem, but the character work for everyone but Harry is so disjointed that not a single death holds the remotest bit of impact and a series of action movie quips fall to the floor with resounding thuds.

The dourness and arch mythmaking of Deathly Hallows completely leaches out the subtle imagery and beauty Yates brought to Half-Blood Prince, leaving us with a mess of desaturated, cluttered visuals that rival only Chris Columbus’s as the worst in the series.

Deathly Hallows Part 2 is a whirlwind roller coaster of a film that keeps the same, fantasy movie thrills coming, but it’s yet another bungle in a beloved film franchise that I’ve come to realize only has two or three genuinely great movies to its name.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1006

Reviews In This Series

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (Columbus, 2001)

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Columbus, 2002)

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Cuáron, 2004)

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Newell, 2005)

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Yates, 2007)

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Yates, 2009)

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 (Yates, 2010)

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 (Yates, 2011)

Where Did You Come From, Where Did You Go?

Year: 2016

Director: Dan Kwan & Daniel Scheinert

Cast: Paul Dano, Daniel Radcliffe, Mary Elizabeth Winstead 

Run Time: 1 hour 37 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

We must always allow a movie its concept, that core flight of fancy that lays the groundwork for its plot. Sure, some concepts are more of a slight against decency, but since when did decency ever make much sense? You’d think a farting corpse would be much less offensive and controversial than one that rises from the grave to devour the flesh of the living, but The Walking Dead’s ratings proudly announce that they’re not. So, there you go. Decency be damned. Those that condemn Swiss Army Man as “that Farting Corpse Movie” are entirely missing the point. It’s a wonderful, beautiful hilarious, elegant, intelligent… Farting Corpse Movie.

I mean, a spade’s still a spade.

So, the flatulent cadaver in question belongs to Manny (Daniel Radcliffe). One day he washes up on the shore of a desert island just when the stranded Hank (Paul Dano) is about to give up and kill himself. Many farts later, Hank discovers that Manny’s gas can propel him through water, so he rides him like a jet ski to the mainland. Thus begins a journey to find home, where Hank discovers that Manny has many wonderful, helpful properties that allow him to act as an axe, a thermos, a compass, a gun, and much more. 

He’s mildly phased when Manny begins to talk, but is ecstatic to have a companion. He begins to teach Manny about what it means to be a human, but slowly realizes that maybe he doesn’t actually know. His life before this was empty, friendless, sad, and kinda creepy. He stalked a girl he sees on the bus (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) and sent e-cards to his dad, and that’s about it. So it takes the friendship of a dead person to help him feel truly alive.

You know, just like in ALL movies with fart jokes.

It’s true that Swiss Army Man is frequently sophomoric and never stops being deeply weird, but it’s a movie that explicitly deals with the concept of weirdness in a way that most indie shock flicks wouldn’t even dream of. It blows up the idea, deeply examines the societal structures that dictate normality, finds them wanting, then tears off in a refreshingly bold direction. At its core, Swiss Army Man is a member of a hallowed, ancient genre (the male buddy comedy), but it remixes that conceit into something dazzling and original.

Although the basic plot structure adheres to that surprisingly mundane formula, there is no point at which Swiss Army Man stops pushing the envelope. It is a scatological, explicit, vaguely homoerotic adventure that drags you up and down your scale of emotions and plunks you down at the end, bewildered and exhausted yet strangely satisfied. This is a definition-defying movie, entirely open to interpretation yet nevertheless presenting a solid, identifiable story. It’s an enormously cumbersome task to describe it, but I feel an urgent need to push on because it struck a chord deep within me.

Like most viewers with the fortitude to soldier past the opening ten minutes (a sequence almost entirely centered upon farting – the easily-shocked don’t possess the strength required to break through that hardened crust to find the comedy crème-brûlée hiding beneath), I felt a deep, primordial, almost involuntary connection to Swiss Army Man that I can’t quite put my finger on. Not that I particularly want to. I’m perfectly content that my feelings are as tangled, perplexing, and ineffable as the movie itself. 

But the fact remains that Swiss Army Man is an intensely emotional, intelligent journey that it has absolutely no right to be. But the weirdness of its concept is exactly what opens it up to a whole new level of philosophical discourse.

Yeah, I used the phrase “philosophical discourse” in this review. I’m as shocked as you that it came up.

Alright, I think that I’ve got all my babbling out. Let’s talk for a bit about solid facts that we can actually quantify. Like this one: The score for Swiss Army Man has instantly risen into my Top Ten movie scores of all time.* 

It’s an incredibly important facet of the film’s atmosphere, an eclectic, mostly a cappella work that is integrated with the onscreen action so thoroughly that the characters literally interact with it. Their actions, dialogue, and the snippets of cultural detritus that make up their worldview are all incorporated into this stunning, bright score that’s simultaneously a soaring celebration of the film’s sense of adventure and a reflection of the ramshackle facsimile of the world that Hank has created around himself, composed of bits and pieces of litter he has found in nature. It’s the first score I’ve heard in a long time that feels like a vital and integral part of the narrative alongside driving the emotion of the scenes. Also, it accomplishes the impossible by transmogrifying f**king “Cotton Eyed Joe” into a hauntingly beautiful melody. There’s some straight-up black magic going on here.

I will not go into detail about myself tearing up over “Cotton Eyed Joe,” but I will close this rapturous segment with the idea that this music (especially a song entitled “Montage”) calls a lot of attention to the artifice of Swiss Army Man, which performs a manifestly important service. By reminding us that this is all a work of fiction, it allows us to escape that constant dithering between what is real, what is fake, and whether Manny is imaginary or not. It’s all imaginary. This is just a movie, after all. That frank admission cuts through the BS and brings you up close and personal with the actual content.

Speaking of black magic, Swiss Army Man would not work whatsoever if it weren’t for the herculean efforts of Daniel Radcliffe and Paul Dano, whose fearless performances propel the comedy into the stratosphere. On the most fundamental level, the fact that they commit enough to allow us to believe in what’s happening to them is astounding. Then they craft an emotional throughline around that core, another Sisyphean task. Then they have the gall to make it funny?

*For the record, that Top Ten also includes a fair bit of John Williams, maybe some Carpenter, and definitely Jim Dooley’s score for Pushing Daisies, which I’m well aware is not a movie, but I could not care less.

God damn it guys, leave some talent for the rest of us.

Radcliffe is downright perfect, maintaining his corpselike stiffness while creating an emotionally resonant character and precisely modulating his voice to capture the innocent wonder and fish-out-of-water hilarity of a corpse discovering the world for the first (or is it second?) time. It’s a physically, vocally, tonally unsurpassable work, and he does it all in an accent that isn’t even his own. While his body shakes with farts. And a prosthetic erection wiggles around in his jeans. Honestly, it’s a miracle any performer played this role, let alone Harry Potter. 

Dano is likewise superb, but his character falls into a much more recognizable vein (for the purposes of the film’s commentary on the sad, vaguely repulsive, self-serious lives of the young adults that inevitably populate these types of movies), so his performance is intentionally a bit less noticeable.

These two actors power-charge the giddy tone of this ridiculous, beautiful movie, so much so that they even survive its terrible ending. There is perhaps no way this movie could have ended in a proper, satisfying way, but the overlong finale is a little too intent on flooding Hank’s world with actual reality, then scuttling it all once more. It’s an ending that provides too little and too much explanation, defying an important set of character dynamics to return to the now-faded shock value of its opening. But other than that, Swiss Army Man is an incredible piece of work that defies Hollywood’s strict storytelling structure, reinventing the wheel of a hoary, predictable comedy genre in an innovative and intensely compelling way.

TL;DR: Swiss Army Man is a blissfully weird, surprisingly beautiful movie.

Rating: 8/10

Word Count: 1361

When Phoenixes Cry

Year: 2009

Director: David Yates

Cast: Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, Rupert Grint

Run Time: 2 hours 33 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG

The Harry Potter film franchise is a lot like a series of Craigslist missed connections: “I caught a glimpse of a decent subplot but it vanished when I turned back.” I was excited to spend time with a good director, but I hardly saw you at all.” “You farted on my hand and I loved it.”

Even with Order of the Phoenix, a movie I truly admired, there was always something incomplete about the Potter films, as opposed to the thrumming, fleshed-out universe of J. K. Rowling’s novels. But Half-Blood Prince, the sixth film in the series, is something special. It’s the second longest flick in the flock, which doesn’t do it any favors, but it’s also the second film to have a director return to the world of Potter, allowing him to settle into and expand upon his original vision. The first time this happened, that director was Chris Columbus, and his reaction was to further embalm his mummified and dissected material so it would stay safe and dry forever and ever.

But this time we have David Yates, a man who isn’t exactly Orson Welles, but who is just as far from Ed Wood. His Phoenix is a perfectly adept, streamlined narrative with a keen creative eye and, allowed time to explore, his Potter explodes with distinctive vision. Whether that’s entirely his doing or the ministrations of cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel (the man behind Amélie) is anybody’s guess, but the fact remains that Half-Blood Prince is aesthetically stunning, narratively secure, and emotionally vibrant like no Harry Potter film before or since.

This may have been rectified if they hadn’t cut Pigwidgeon out of Goblet of Fire.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, in case you have Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Minded yourself and a portion of the relationship memories you erased included reading the Harry Potter books, is about the sixteen-year-old wizard Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe). After the events of Phoenix, the entire wizarding world knows that the Dark Lord Voldemort has risen again and his followers the Death Eaters are bent on destroying wizards and witches of impure blood and enslaving or killing the nonmagic folk known as Muggles. People are dying and disappearing, yet Harry – despite possibly being the only one who can stop Voldemort according to a prophecy – s only a boy and as such must return to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardy with his friends Ron (Rupert Grint) and Hermione (Emma Watson) and at least attempt to lead a normal life.

Over the course of the year, the Headmaster Albus Dumbledore (Michael Gambon) gives him a series of lessons on the history of Voldemort’s youth, mostly centering on a pivotal memory that he must collect from the sycophantic Potions professor Horace Slughorn (Jim Broadbent). This memory may be key to destroying Voldemort and, luckily, a secondhand Potions book – property of the Half-Blood Prince – has scribbled hints in the margins that help Harry ace his class and get into Slughorn’s good graces.

Oh, and dare I mention… Hormones have cast their spell over Hogwarts. Cormac (Freddie Stroma) wants to get with Hermione, except she has unrequited feelings for Ron, who spends all his time snogging Lavender (Jessie Cave), who gets upset when a misapplied love potion causes him to fall for Romilda (Anna Shaffer), who desperately wants to get it in with Harry, who has to surgically reattach his lower jaw ever time he sees Ginny (Bonnie Wright), and I have a crush on Neville (Matthew Lewis), but not until his Attitude photo spread.

It’s like American Pie but with an easier entry point for wand puns.

I’m gonna cut right to the chase. Half-Blood Prince is the only Harry Potter flick to be a truly great movie. As it deftly splits its attention between comic teenybopper romp and an out-and-out siege movie, it actually becomes the only film to actively improve upon the source material in any respect. The less constricted perspective of the cinema frees it to more effortlessly juggle those wildly disparate tones, allowing the bright glow of youth to contrast sharply with the constant, imminent cloud of danger outside threatening to snuff it out.

Every aspect of the film is in service to this oh so delicate balance. It’s a good thing too, considering the gargantuan tonal lurches the script asks the film to make, sometimes in the space of a single cut. Without Delbonnel’s master class sharp-shooting, the entire performing arts sector of the British Isles pulling out all the stops (and pushing in a couple gos for good measure), and David Yates allowing his taps-running Britishisms to fill in the cracks with a sly sense of humor, Half-Blood Prince could very easily have collapsed under its own weight like a house of cards that dedicates its third season to nuts and bolts policy-making instead of sexy Kevin Spacey murder.

But we’ll get into that in a second. What I’m really dying to bring up is the screenplay, the fifth to e written by Potter squatter Steve Kloves. I suppose that after four tries, you’re bound to get in a good one eventually. If an infinite number of Steve Kloveses hacked randomly at an infinite number of J. K. Rowling novels, eventually one would produce a coherent, self-contained script. But boy is it a good’un, an entirely legible narrative with hardly a kink. Voldemort’s backstory is the only cut bit that suffers in any way, rendering a key scene in the third act a little logically muddy, but third acts were hardly Rowling’s strong suit to begin with. As an act of adaptation, Half-Blood Prince is a pristine piece of work chock full of logical character progressions, recognizable story arcs, and a more purposeful forward momentum than even the novel can boast.

Enjoy the book as I do, it’s mostly just Harry reading in bed and trying to hide his boners.

Perhaps the most striking element of Half-Blood Prince is its aesthetic, which relies heavily on an autumnal scheme, all earth tones and scattered leave, to really drive home the point that the lives Harry and his friends used to lead are drawing to a close, one way or another. The end of school is drawing near, and the big bad world (which is now more than ever trafficking in horror imagery) is waiting to swallow them up. It’s a fantasy nightmare vision of senior year, really, and when it’s not being meaningful it’s content to be just plumb breathtaking. There are no single shots in the entire franchise more staggeringly beautiful than Aragog’s funeral, the confrontation on the hill, or Dumbledore’s whirling inferno of flames (also a fabulous integration of CGI), which combine wide framing and dazzling bursts of color to pants-soiling effect.

The cinematography is endlessly adaptable, ranging from the minutely playful (Dumbledore’s winking entrance) to the operatically grandiose and gorgeous [SPOILERS One of the final shots of the film – in tribute after Dumbledore’s death, the students and staff raises their wands into the air, blasting apart Voldemort’s Dark mark with beacons of light. It is the dawn of a new era of Harry Potter, both in terms of visceral emotion and visual abandon]. If I could elope to Vegas with any movie’s mise-en-scene and have a brief but fiery love affair, it would definitely be Half-Blood Prince.

Our registry can be found at AMC.com.

Second in command is the acting. Of course, by this point, you already know that the massive stable of adult actors that frequently waste their talent on fifteen-second scenes of eating dinner while wearing funny hats are pretty much unimpeachable, so I shall only highlight one key performer: Michael Gambon. The role of Dumbledore has been quite a journey for him, having taken over following the untimely death of Richard Harris after Chamber of Secrets. After three years of worrying at the part like a dog with a bone, he is finally in command, following his own inscrutable, tweaky path as the immeasurably harming, incredibly baffling headmaster.

And after a veritable Black Diamond slope of peaks and valleys, our three child performers (by this point all full-grown adults) have all finally outdone themselves, turning in their absolute best work. Their chemistry is warm and lived-in (as well it should be, after eight years of this nonsense), their lines readings are reeled back from the heady brinks of shrilldom, and their eyebrows are safely locked away where they can’t cause any more harm. Just like the human body, a film with a strong core helps everything else grow stronger, and Half-Blood Prince is an all-around beefcake.

With the franchise’s two characteristically weak elements (child acting and storytelling) finally firmly in place, this allows the film to go places none of its predecessors have before. When it’s funny, it’s laugh out loud hilarious, and when it’s serious, it bludgeons you with the force of a troll’s cudgel. This is the first Harry Potter that can outright be called a comedy without a whiff of fine print, but it also has the power to get you cowering behind your couch cushions in terror. 

It’s that good.

Now obviously, it ain’t perfection on a stick. The next movies are gonna have to do some real legwork to make up for lost narrative ground (we’re talking large scale here, the movie is still perfectly self-contained as hell), and a couple late reveals are about as tense as announcing what restaurant will be catering your bar mitzvah. Oh, and there’s one truly egregious editing trick that tries to drive in the horror of a situation by making sure you can only see it in millisecond chunks. 

But what the hey, this is the movie business. If you want perfect product, just rewatch Airplane!. Half-Blood Prince is an impeccable Harry Potter movie, it is my favorite Harry Potter movie, and if you had to pick out only a single DVD from the towering HP stack, do yourself a favor and grab this one. Thank me later.

TL;DR: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is a wonderfully crafted teen fantasy, delicately combining teen hijinks and tense siege drama.

Rating: 8/10

Word Count: 1714

Reviews In This Series

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (Columbus, 2001)

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Columbus, 2002)

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Cuarón, 2004)

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Newell, 2005)

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Yates, 2007)

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Yates, 2009)

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 (Yates, 2010)

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 (Yates, 2011)

Through The Fire And Flames

Year: 2007

Director: David Yates

Cast: Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, Rupert Grint

Run Time: 2 hours 18 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

The first four Harry Potter movies are like distant relatives overstaying their welcome during the Christmas holidays. They devour the full stock of your pantry (i.e. any working British actor above “street mime” caliber), they keep you up with their excessive snoring (or rather their brobdingnagian run times), and to your consternation, they just keep coming back every year without fail.  They are all jagged, ungainly narrative detritus usually brought back from the brink of stultifying despair on the strength of a veritable army of veteran adult performers and production designers so untouchably brilliant that they could literally murder someone, make their ribcage into a lampshade, and it would be so beautiful that nobody would find any problem with it.

When last we left our heroes, it was with 2005’s Goblet of Fire, the last stage of Harry Potter’s “childish” phase. That entry was marked by a particularly devout slash and burn approach when it came to the story, leaving the film a smoldering rubble with only Ralph Fiennes standing triumphant amid the flames. But after all that painful slogging, David Yates stepped up to the plates, and like its titular bird, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix rose from the ashes of the franchise, heralding a new dawn for us all.

Plus, it’s the shortest film of the series. Rejoice!

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, in case you yourself are a book and haven’t grown self-aware enough to discover the concept of reading, is about the fifteen-year-old wizard Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe). At the end of last term, he saw the Dark Lord Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes) rise again, but the paranoid Minister of Magic Cornelius Fudge (Robert Hardy) believes that his claims are false, brought on by the promptings of the avaricious headmaster of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, Albus Dumbledore (Michael Gambon). This is patently untrue, of course, but he appoints the syrupy and officious Professor Umbridge (Imelda Staunton) to the post of Defense Against the Dark Arts to ensure the Ministry’s hold over Hogwarts while he continues his smear campaign on Potter and Dumbledore from the outside.

Torn between the inordinate responsibility he feels toward the Order of the Phoenix (a secret society leading the charge against Voldemort – to which his godfather Sirius Black (Gary Oldman) belongs), the very adult bureaucratic and political pressures of the Ministry, the surge of teenage hormones and exam stress that lead to infighting with his best friends Ron (Rupert Grint) and Hermione (Emma Watson), and the sudden urges to storm off and listen to Simple Plan alone in his room, Harry is going to have a very rough year.

Being 15 is just a barrel of dicks, isn’t it?

So a hawk- or particularly talented pigeon-eyed viewer may ask, how exactly does one accomplish the Herculean feat of adapting the doorstopper Order of the Phoenix into the shortest movie of the franchise? And that includes the two films that tackled only half the final book apiece, thank you very much. Screenwriter Michael Goldenberg might tell you this or that about writing while standing up or the miraculous powers of lime extract, but the answer is very simple: He actually cared about telling a coherent story that doesn’t rely on a thousand page children’s book to fill in the alarmingly huge gaps that could (and frequently did) fit a grown man.

Mind you, the storytelling of Phoenix is not airtight. Several of its marbles roll irrevocably out of bounds, most notably with the character of Tonks (Natalia Tena) who may well have been a large chocolate gateau for all the purpose she serves the film. But when narrative corners are cut (and with source material as extensive as this, it requires more cutting than a Flock of Seagulls reunion tour), Goldenberg uses pre-established elements (like alternate characters or story beats) to bridge the gaps instead of just skipping past the difficult bits like the faulty record needle of the previous four films.

In addition to the first generally coherent script of the franchise, Order of the Phoenix also boasts a remarkably adept visual schema courtesy of cinematographer Slawomir Idziak. As I said before, the films have always had nut-busting production design (a tradition continued here with Stuart Craig’s glittering obsidian Ministry of Magic and the defined yet somehow infinite complexities of the Room of Requirement), but only Goblet of Fire’s encroaching gloom came close to resembling a unifying aesthetic. Here, the knobbly yet prim structure and stolid lighting of Umbridge and her domain contrast sharply with the heavy shadows, vivid blues, and bright slashes of light that define the clutter of Harry’s reality. This helps emphasize the central conflict of the film, between the Ministry’s careful restructuring of the media narrative and the grim reality they’re hoping to conceal from the world at large as well as themselves.

Perhaps my favorite detail of the film, Phoenix in a microcosm, is the mirror in the Room of Requirement, where Harry and his friends secretly practice defensive spells under the nose of the Ministry. Over the course of the film, the mirror begins to fill up with newspaper clippings and photographs depicting the missing and the dead as Voldemort and his Death Eaters continue their wicked work in the shadows. This collection is never explicitly mentioned in the dialogue, but it fleshes out the dangerous and terrifying world that lies in wait outside the walls of the school. It’s subtle, powerful, and entirely visual, and a big part of why Phoenix is the best Potter yet.

Plus, Daniel Radcliffe was 18 at this point and beginning his conversion into a fully weaponized cute person.

So, have we had just about enough of Film Major Brennan for one article? Let’s just tuck him away again until he can wax poetic about slasher sound cues where he can’t hurt anybody. Because Order of the Phoenix is also a remarkably fun movie. It’s dark, brooding, and deals with mature themes, yes, but it’s also a school rebellion flick. There are moments that capture that summer camp rush of subversive mischief, finally giving the caretaker Filch (David Bradley) something genuinely amusing to do, and allowing the ensemble – especially Neville Longbottom (Matthew Lewis) and newcomer Luna Lovegood (the incomparably dizzy Evanna Lynch) – to truly inhabit their roles and create a living tapestry to support Harry and his exploits.

The acting is likewise much improved, especially after the discouraging Goblet, which almost led to a series of costly psychotherapy sessions. Emma Watson’s eyebrows still clearly long to be set loose in the untamed wilderness, but as a whole, the trio at the core are improving markedly as they age, and the adult performers are back on track as the fossil fuel that keeps the engine running smoothly.

Alan Rickman and Maggie Smith carry on as always, because they are untouchable denizens of Mount Olympus, Michael Gambon has finally settled into his wizened peak as the powerful but ancient headmaster, and Ralph Fiennes returns with his excellent, bored Drawl of Evil, but two newcomers steal the show. Helena Bonham Carter’s performance as the insane prison escapee Bellatrix Lestrange is like an exploding nail gun, pure menacing power, and Imelda Staunton provides a perfectly pitched, sickeningly sweet performance reminiscent of a genius pantomime villain. You boo and you hiss when she comes on and you love to hate her, but the depths of her wickedness turn your stomach, especially in the showstopping detention scene. 

It’s saying something when Emma McFreaking Thompson turns in the worst performance of your entire adult cast, I’ll just leave it at that.

Please note that I don’t say these things lightly. I’m literally sitting next to a VHS copy of Dead Again as we speak.

However, for all the massive improvements Phoenix amasses upon its predecessors, it’s still weighed down by certain demining flaws. The purely anonymous score by Nicholas Hooper would be damaging enough, but when it shades into out-and-out lyrical rock songs, the film dives directly into the nearest dumpster. And the climactic battle sequence that closes the film alternates between electrifying thriller imagery (and some truly impressive visual effects, especially between Dumbledore and Voldemort) and wimpy light shows hardly more arresting than a game of laser tag. It too frequently slides into camp territory to sell its emotional climax, which it then immediately forgets about anyway. Also there’s a shot where it looks like Voldemort is doing jazz hands.

Let’s just say it’s a bit of a bumpy landing. But it’s the least turbulent Potter thus far, and I could see myself rewatching this one without wanting to stick a fork in an electric eel, so three cheers for Order of the Phoenix!

TL;DR: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is a fun, flashy, aesthetically precise film.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 1497

Reviews In This Series
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (Columbus, 2001)
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Columbus, 2002)
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Cuarón, 2004)
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Newell, 2005)
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Yates, 2007)
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Yates, 2009)

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 (Yates, 2010)

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 (Yates, 2011)

The Holey Grail

Year: 2005

Director: Mike Newell

Cast: Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, Rupert Grint

Run Time: 2 hours 37 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

We’re halfway there! As I revisit the fourth of the eight films of the Harry Potter franchise, which I have not watched since graduating high school and, subsequently, film school, I have come to an interesting and I daresay valuable midpoint conclusion: Don’t grow up. 

Of the first four Harry Potter films, the best of them (which, in my opinion at least, is unambiguously Prisoner of Azkaban) is still a muddled, conflict-free pile of dizzy aesthetic that leaves itself unguarded to quite justifiable attacks about its misuse of inveterate British actors as overqualified set dressing and being easily outshone by its own children’s choir. It’s a sorry lot, to say the least.

But we shall sally forth and hope that somebody somewhere along the line figures out how the hell to makes British teenagers interesting. You’d think magic would do it, but you would be wrong.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, in case you’re an emu who found this page open on a safari-er’s lost iPad and have never heard of one of those “book” things, is about the 14-year-old wizard Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe). What he really needs to do is get a haircut, but what he does instead is attend the Quidditch World Cup with his BFFs Ron (Rupert Grin) and Hermione (Emma Watson). An attack by Death Eaters – supporters of the Dark Lord Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes, but not until much, much later) – cuts the event short and casts a pall over the kids’ return to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, quite literally, in fact.

The dominating aesthetic of Goblet of Fire is gloom, and it creeps in around the edges of every frame. Dull blues, searing oranges, and dreary greys loom everywhere you look. It’s a rather striking statement, especially combined with the sudden intimacy of the sets. Cast sizes are smaller, excesses are toned down, and in general it lends to a feeling of the film closing in on you, by far the single most effective cinematic achievement Goblet can boast.

But I digress. This year, Hogwarts is playing host to the Triwizard Tournament, an international championship between the wizarding schools of Durmstrang – a Bulgarian school represented by the champion Viktor Krum (Stanislav Ianevski) -, Beauxbatons  - a French school whose champion is Fleur Delacour (Clémence Poésy) – and Hogwarts – as represented by Cedric Diggory (the pale white, ice cold, impossibly fast and strong Robert Pattinson). This is the first time in many years that the notoriously dangerous tournament has been played, because the Ministry of Magic has figured that, between the rampaging troll three years ago, then those pesky attempted basilisk murders, then the repeated break-ins by a convicted killer, Hogwarts is, like, totally chill now.

Naturally, dark forces set to work almost immediately and Harry is forced against his will to enter the tournament, facing the trio of deadly tasks and set on a path that will, unbeknownst to him, eventually lead to the resurrection of Lord Voldemort himself.

It’s not that much worse than finals, really.

There is a certain challenge inherent in adapting a 700 page book into a film that won’t rupture children’s bladders. I’m aware of that, but Goblet of Fire plows through the plot at a blistering pace. It clips a subplot here, an entire story branch there, mowing down characters and story beats like a mad slasher. Don’t misunderstand me, I’m all for some ruthlessly efficiency editing, but the mad pruning that takes place here has the curiously dissonant effect of simultaneously removing far too much to let any of the scenes breathe, choking out any emotion or wonder, and leaving too many loose ends haphazardly jammed in (merely because they were things that happened in the book), hopelessly bereft of any connective tissue. If you can come up with any justifiable reason for Rita Skeeter, the Quidditch World Cup, or the Yule Ball to be in this movie, you are a far better filmmaker than I. Or Steve Kloves. Oh, and the film is too damn long, but complaining about that at this point s like trying to drain the ocean with a funnel.

As the film is sprinting along through its slapdash parade of half-digested scenes, it’s a miracle that it even finds the time to alight upon something so aesthetically present as the “closing-in gloom” I mentioned above, so it should come as no surprise that Goblet of Fire does absolutely nothing else cinematically surprising for the remainder of its duration. It might be literally too much to expect even anonymous directing from the man behind Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, so I guess we should consider ourselves lucky the film turned out as stylistically responsible as it did. It might be stuffy, awkward, and overlong, but this was 2005 after all. Even the actors’ hair was like that.

The Hot Topic generation will be the death of us all.

Actually, in many ways Goblet of Fire is very similar to puberty: It’s a bumbling, creaking shift to a more grown-up stage in the Harry Potter franchise, replete with barely understood mood swings, a vague, foggy idea of how girls work, and a supreme lack of humor about itself. Where Azkaban had a sprightly, fun fairy tale quality woven throughout, Goblet of Fire is just plain dour, only saved by two splendid comic scenes performed by Shirley Henderson (Returning as the freewheeling avalanche of self pity that is Moaning Myrtle) and – bizarrely – Alan Rickman, the franchise’s patron saint of pregnant pauses and nasal wickedness.

This pair of performances is two-thirds of a trio that forms the Holy Trinity of Goblet of Fire. For, in the finale, they are joined by Ralph Fiennes, whose Lord Voldemort is a tiger caged in a barely human body; fluid, powerful, and unspeakably evil. His make-up is flawless, his performance doubly so, but he comes too late to repair the deep tissue damage that he film has already suffered at the hands of his co-stars and his scene is marred by perhaps the film’s single worst use of the audience’s knowledge of the novel as a narrative crutch.

About those co-stars: The trio of child actors at the core of the series have been remarkably inconsistent as they’ve been passed from director to director like cheery British hot potatoes, but Goblet might just be their lowest point. Emma Watson’s eyebrows seem to have become sentient, living a completely separate and perfectly happy life atop her head, wriggling about without a care in the world, Daniel Radcliffe jerks about like a wind-up monkey clashing his cymbals together, and Rupert Grint vanishes for long stretches of the film, allowing one to forget that he was there in the first place. 

The adults hardly fare better. Michael Gambon in particular is making me look like an idiot for expressing ill-remembered faith in him several reviews ago as he dashes about barking random lines like a child playing with a new toy, and Roger Lloyd Pack (as ministry official Barty Crouch) fills what the slashed script has suddenly rendered an empty characters with twitched wiggling. 

It’s like he’s his own private sign language interpreter.

It’s unambiguously unimpressive to say the least, though at least the action sequences are blanketed in the best CGI of the series to date. In fact, a flying scene with Harry and a dragon zipping around the turrets of Hogwarts castle is a spectacularly seamless moment and perhaps the best single sustained effects sequence in the entire first half of the franchise.

All in all, Goblet of Fire isn’t a total wash, and it never ever sinks to the tedious depths of Chris Columbus at his most taxidermic, but it’s an uneven, anonymous movie, and that goes against the grain of everything that Harry Potter needs to be.

Excuse me while I go cry nerd tears, because this one was my favorite book. Until next tie, I’m forever yours in Potterdom. For better or for worse. Usually worse, I’m afraid.

TL;DR: Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire is an uneven movie spiked by a gloomy, mature aesthetic and a trio of stellar performances.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1380

Reviews In This Series
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (Columbus, 2001)
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Columbus, 2002)
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Cuarón, 2004)
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Newell, 2005)
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Yates, 2007)
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Yates, 2009)

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 (Yates, 2010)

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 (Yates, 2011)

Surely You Can't Be Sirius

Year: 2004

Director: Alfonso Cuarón

Cast: Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, Rupert Grint

Run Time: 2 hours 22 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is the point where the series begins to settle in for the long haul. It’s still self-contained and epic-lite, not yet reaching the dark depths of the following entries, but the series first finds its personality in the chapters of this, the third book.

Prisoner of Azkaban, the third film in the franchise, is directed by Alfonso Cuarón, the man behind Gravity, my second favorite film of 2013 and one of the most perfect sci-fi thrillers ever created. Needles to say, he is a deeply idiosyncratic director capable of tremendously great things. Azkaban is not one of them, but it’s a damn sight better than the profoundly impersonal Chris Columbus’ Sorcerer’s Stone and Chamber of Secrets, which feel like dusty museum pieces. Azkaban may have inherited many of their laws, but at the very least it crackles with much-needed life.

And great ties.

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, in case you have been buried in soft peat for the past 18 years out of reach of a library, tells the story of thirteen-year-old wizard Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe). When he returns to the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry for his third year, he discovers that a violent escapee from the wizard prison Azkaban – Sirius Black (Gary Oldman) – has him in his sights. As a result, the school is being guarded by the dementors, a race of hooded, soul-sucking creatures that feed on happy memories and who affect Harry tremendously thanks to the atrocities in his past.

To help defend himself from the dementors, Harry takes extra lessons with the new Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher, Professor Lupin (David Thewlis), with whom he develops and instant rapport. As the year wears on, Harry – along with his best friends Ron (Rupert Grint) and Hermione (Emma Watson), must battle the dementors, discover the truth about Sirius Black, and fight to save the life of Buckbeak the hippogriff – a favored companion of their friend Hagrid (Robbie Coltrane) – after it nearly gores their rival Draco Malfoy (Tom Felton) for being a douche with hair like a cantaloupe dropped from a skyscraper.

The mid-2000's were a hard time to be a teenager.

The jump in quality between Columbus and Cuarón is immediately apparent from the opening scene – which is the best in the series thus far - and continues until the very end, enveloping the film in a warm, loving embrace. The difference in the aesthetic and production design is legitimately staggering. 

The magical world of Hogwarts dusts itself off to become a nuanced, living, breathing organism that acts as an additional, fully fleshed out character. Included in the castle’s thorough redesign is a clock tower, a beautiful spindly bridge that could only be held up by magic, and a Stonehenge-like structure that connects the passage from the castle to the grounds. With these additions, Hogwarts becomes more open and fluid (not to mention unbelievably pretty), lending it a sense of unified geography instead of the previous films’ disjointed Rolodex of medieval-looking university broom cupboards.

The costume design is also similarly unstifled. Variations are provided in the black Hogwarts uniforms and the film introduces street clothes to the characters’ wardrobe, allowing them to switch up the color scheme and spruce up the one-note drabness of the previous, more book-reliant entries.

On top of all of this, Cuarón introduces some stylistic fillips that do wonders fleshing out the vast world around the miniscule scope of Harry’s school adventures with his friends. The film’s transitions are effortless, showing the castle in bustling action (my personal favorite touch being the use of the Whomping Willow to depict the passage of the seasons), allowing the film to sprint along at a spritely pace.

It’s a real breath of fresh air following the interminable Chamber of Secrets.

I could go on and on about how the film displays increased facility with framing, containing more singularly striking images than the other two films combined, or how the inclusion of a  “toil and trouble” musical motif introduces a cheerily baroque, almost medieval tone, but I must remember that my esteem for Azkaban is largely hyperinflated in comparison to its immediate predecessors. As a matter of fact, Azkaban has a tendency to get bogged down by almost the exact same problems, though they are fewer in number.

First and foremost, the plot, while more limber and fast-paced thanks to some well-executed excision, is a little too thin on the ground, cutting out important details. And I don’t mean “wah, wah, they cut out the reveal that Crookshanks is part kneazle, I’m a nerd, kick me.” I mean, “The third act is based almost entirely on a series of revelations that hinge upon information we weren’t actually given.” Yes, it’s true that most of the modern world has read the Harry Potter books. But that’s no excuse to lazily leave half your character moments scattered on the cutting room floor like they’re so many intern corpses.

Prisoner of Azkaban is likewise weighed down by an uncommonly shaggy cast. The child actors neither match their highest highs nor their lowest lows, trapped in an unremarkable limbo, but the adult cast buries its shiniest gems too deep into the third act. Beginning with Mark Williams’ unfocused turn as Arthur Weasley, the torch of mediocrity is carried beyond the prologue by David Thewlis’ stop-and-go performance. Their acting is about as patchy as their robes. In addition, Michael Gambon (replacing the late Richard Harris as Headmaster Dumbledore) has yet to settle into the ethereal otherness of the role, and Potter mainstays Maggie Smith and Alan Rickman are unceremoniously stacked in a disused corner.

The newcomer trio of Emma Thompson (as the flighty Divination professor Sibyl Trelawny), Gary Oldman (as the shattered, hollow Sirius Black), and Timothy Spall (as the sniveling, smarmy Peter Pettigrew) are all unforgivably incredible, but their best work comes after a Lord of the Rings-length slog through bare adequacy. Thanks to the hard-earned efforts of a solid cast at their most mediocre, the film’s emotional beats feel cold and perfunctory.

Like a Goosebumps book in the freezer.

The film slightly makes up for these deficits with an omnipresent puckish sense of humor. But sometimes it slips too far into kiddie territory, most notably with a Jamaican shrunken head that talks, which will make you want to fill your ears with cement.

The last bastion of quality in Prisoner of Azkaban is the special effects, which are without qualification the best of the series up to this point. Maybe the extra year gap between 2002’s Chamber of Secrets and Azkaban allowed CGI technology to catch up with the series’ ambition, or maybe the FX crew simply cared more. Who knows. 

They grew a smidge too self-indulgent when they made the decision to digitally animate a dog instead of doing the blisteringly easy thing and picking one up from the pound, but the rendering of the creatures – Buckbeak in particular – is superb, largely free of the alienating side-effect of looking like the monsters are occupying some dimension that’s next door to ours. They even figured out how to make Hagrid work, allowing him to share frame with other actors, rather than sit up all on his lonesome in claustrophobic low angle close-up shots.

The only rough patch is the (SPOILERS – oh, who am I kidding) werewolf, but that’s more the fault of a goofy design than shoddy animation.

Am I a man, or am I a muppet?

So there you have it. Prisoner of Azkaban is unmistakably the best early Harry Potter movie, but it’s still an early Harry Potter movie. There’s a lot more to chew on in a much more manageable time frame, recommending this film far more than the others in the original three, more child-oriented Potters. It’s not Cuarón’s best work, but it’s still Cuaróns work, and that counts for a lot.

TL;DR: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is emotionally thin but aesthetically ebullient.
Rating: 7/10
Word Count: 1357
Reviews In This Series
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (Columbus, 2001)
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Columbus, 2002)
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Cuarón, 2004)
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Newell, 2005)
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Yates, 2007)
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Yates, 2009)

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 (Yates, 2010)

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 (Yates, 2011)

Do You Believe In Magic?

Year: 2002

Director: Chris Columbus

Cast: Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson

Run Time: 2 hours 41 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets is a very tough movie to sort out. Between being slightly better than the source novel and slightly worse than The Sorcerer’s Stone, despite being a tad better in the exact places where that film was weak, we’ve got a bit of a mess on our hands, reviewing-wise. But never fear! I’m no stranger to messes. I did successfully (and handsomely) review Grizzly II: The Concert, after all.

There comes a point in the course of a horror blog career that simple challenges like murky inferiorities cease to scare you, as long as everything in the frame is visible 99% of the time. But I digress.

Handsomely.

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, in case you have just come back from the dead and missed the period between 1997 and 2011, tells the story of Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe), a polite twelve-year-old boy with the charming quirk of being a wizard with magical powers. Even though a mysterious house elf named Dobby (Toby Jones) arrives with a warning not to go back to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, he doesn’t listen because Hogwarts is the only place he feels like he belongs.

However, Dobby’s warning comes true when vicious attacks leave various students Petrified in the name of the Heir of Salazar Slytherin (a Hogwarts founder and owner of the most obviously wicked name ever written). Rumors abound that the mythical Chamber of Secrets has been opened by Harry, setting Slytherin’s monster loose on the grounds. Harry and his friends Ron (Rupert Grint) and Hermione (Emma Watson), however, suspect the culprit to be their rival Draco Malfoy (Tom Felton).

This relatively simple plot zips by with all the vigor of a speeding turtle, making you feel every last minute of its hideously distended 2.7 hours.

You could die while watching this movie, reincarnate, grow up, and learn to speak English again, all in time for the finale.

For once, let’s begin with the good, shall we? I mean, if you ignore that previous statement. Which you may well have done, because we all know you only skim these things. 

Chamber of Secrets improves upon its predecessor in this all-important way: It doesn’t let the book get the better of its narrative. This film takes much more license with the source material, streamlining, embellishing, and sometimes even improving it. Several key action sequences are expanded and rendered quite a bit more exciting, whether it be the off-road course of Harry’s fateful Quidditch match, an extended adventure through the titular Chamber, Harry and Ron’s cross-country trip in a flying Ford Anglia, or even Dobby smashing a pudding at the Dursleys’ house. I know, right?

It is hampered somewhat by the unenviable task of interpreting the single weakest ending of the series and its small army of deus ex machina, but compare to Stone, it is a stunning achievement in self-contained storytelling.

The other area where Chamber of Secrets is undeniably superior is its aesthetic, which finds in Chris Columbus a surer hand than he managed to provide before. Several shots even manage to evoke a theme, if you can beieeve that. The opening shot is a stunning evocation of the dull sameness of the Muggle world, and one moment finds Kenneth Branagh’s egotistical Professor Lockhart posing with a painting of himself posing with a painting of himself in a hilarious nesting doll of self-congratulation.

The production design is likewise deftly improved, with additions to the castle rendering it more tactile and earthy. It’s far more believable that humans might inhabit this location, no matter how magical they may be. And the new locations (especially the Weasley family home – The Burrow) are depicted with utmost care and grace.

Loose observation: Nobody at Hogwarts seems to care if students’ lives are endangered, as long as it’s in the scheduled curriculum.

Ah, but here’s where we slip inevitably into mediocrity. The child performances all slip down a peg save for Emma Watson – who alone of the young cast is a marked improvement – and Bonnie Wright (as Ginny Weasley), who imbues her role with a kind of stony determination that would come to define the character. But as for the boys, they're all over the place.

As their voices drop, their performances slip. Maybe they just noticed girls and found themselves far too distracted for anything as subtle as a major motion picture. At any rate, Radcliffe finds himself very taken with Stooge-like overreactions and Felton spits out his dialogue like sunflower seeds, spraying the whole place with fleshy shrapnel. Rupert Grint settles into a strong position when he is called upon to be the comic relief, but otherwise happily whiles away the hours by placing untoward emphasis on random, inappropriate vowels.

By far the best child performance of the entire film is Shirley Henderson who, as a matter of fact, isn’t a child at all, but a fully grown woman who must have access to a lifetime supply of Maybelline. Her performance as Moaning Myrtle is gloopily self-indulgent and fun, swinging over the top and right back around again. The rest of the adults once again fill out an astonishingly solid supporting cast, with new additions Kenneth Branagh (all inflated bravado and squirrely Britishisms) and Jason Isaacs (a picture of well-heeled malice as Lucius Malfoy) proving a perfect match for Harry Potter’s cheerfully epic universe.

Also, he's uncomfortably handsome.

And now, alas, for the truly, admirably bad. The film, insofar as it exists as its own distinct narrative entity, does drop a few conspicuous balls along the way. It completely neglects to set up several important plot points (most notably Lockhart’s self-aggrandizing book collection) and, in one peculiar instance, has two entire characters appear out of the blue as if they’d been there the whole time.

Likewsie, the special effects, while mostly satisfactory, have several uncomfortable rough patches. For every improved Quidditch green screen or fairly seamless flying car moment, there are the hideous Lego monstrosities masquerading as pixies or a set of hideously amateurish paintings that replace the magical moving ones when they think we’re not looking. And while nothing approaches the film-tearing inadequacy of the cabin in the sea scene from Stone, there is one prominently visible moment where the actors are dawdling at the edge of the frame, clearly waiting for their cue.

Toss in a horrific tone that’s waiting desperately in the wings but never called into action and a couple scenes so stiff they have toe tags, and you can’t help but feels the glamor and appeal begin to deflate dejectedly. It’s not a terrible film. In many instances, it is a totally fine, effective one. But it’s a film that goes on for song long that the negatives stretch on into infinity outweighing nearly all the positives at one point or another.

It’s always watchable, but for long stretches it is deathly dull, a descriptor that belongs nowhere near the hallowed grounds of Hogwarts. For better or for worse, I’m ready to move on to Cuarón.

TL;DR: Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets is both a slight improvement and a slight decline from its predecessor.
Rating: 6/10
Word Count: 1222
Reviews In This Series
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (Columbus, 2001)
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Columbus, 2002)
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Cuarón, 2004)
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Newell, 2005)
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Yates, 2007)
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Yates, 2009)

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 (Yates, 2010)

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 (Yates, 2011)