The Bear In The Big Blue Coat

Year: 2014

Director: Paul King

Cast: Ben Whishaw, Hugh Bonneville, Sally Hawkins

Run Time: 1 hour 35 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG

Back in 2014, when the original Paddington was released, it made hardly a blip on my radar. And why would it? I do have a boyfriend who takes me to a lot of kids movies, but that's because he's an animation buff, so this one didn't weigh heavily on his consciousness either. And the character of Paddington is certainly more of a UK phenomenon. Being American, I'd certainly heard of Paddington, but had no affection for him to match that of, say, Harry Potter, The Little Mermaid, or hell, even Amelia Bedelia (I would watch the crap out of an Amelia Bedelia movie, by the way).

So there are a lot of reasons I never sat down to watch Paddington, and now I know a lot of reasons why that was a terrible decision.

Not that Paddington doesn't also make his fair share of terrible decisions.

To my point, I had no idea that Paddington was an actual talking bear, and not a magical stuffed teddy bear á là Ted. I still don't honestly believe that. Someone report back to me and let me know. Anyway,  Paddington (Ben Whishaw) is a talking bear from Darkest Peru who has come to England after the death of his Uncle Pastuzo (Michael Gambon) and the retirement of his Aunt Lucy (Imelda Staunton). These bears were taught about the English language and customs by the explorer Montgomery Clyde (Tim Downie), who promised that the bears would always be welcome in his native land.

Now, many years later, Paddington finds that London is not the glittering gem of hospitality he was promised. The city is a cold, unforgiving place (as Babe could have told him), and it's going to be harder to find a family to take him in than he thought. Fortunately, he catches the eye of artist and author Mary Brown (Sally Hawkins), who allows him to spend the night with her family; protective fuddy-duddy husband Henry (Hugh Bonneville), hormonal tween daughter Judy (Madeleine Harris), and inventive young son Jonathan (Samuel Joslin), and matronly aunt Mrs. Bird (Julie Walters). Thus begins a sweet fish out of water comedy, where Paddington's misunderstanding of English culture, penchant for clumsiness, and absurd love of marmalade get him into quite a few scrapes, but eventually allow him to wiggle his way into the hearts of everyone in town.

That is, except for Natural History Museum taxidermist Millicent (Nicole Kidman), who enlists their anti-bear neighbor Mr. Curry (Peter Capaldi) to help her capture Paddington, who she desparately wants to add to her collection.

She also seems to have acquired her hairstyle from a taxidermied meerkat.

Paddington is no ordinary children's film. Or rather, it is an ordinary children's film, just done extraordinarily well. There's not a single ingredient here that feels unfamiliar, and yet fresh life is breathed into a collection of well-worn tropes by a cast and crew that is utterly, wonderfully committed to making the movie the best possible version of itself it can be. 

The whole thing is just so earnest, in a way that only the British can be. Every character is quirky and fun in quiet, charming little ways (even two background characters - security guards who exist only to be knocked out by the villainess - have a fun little moment where they're playing a game involving guessing the amounts of certain nutrients in a little package of biscuits), and they play off the idea of a talking bear as if it's the most normal thing in the world. Everything in the universe of Paddington is just a little bit off-kilter, which helps to ground the fact that our protagonist is an anthropomorphic CGI cartoon.

And even though everything is twee and fluffy in the best possible way, Paddington - like all great children's films - has a thick vein of darkness running its way through the proceedings to take the edge off the sweetness. This is a movie that literally begins with a young bear's uncle dying in an earhquake, for one thing, but it's also at its core a Pig in the City-esque tale of an innocent trying to make his way through a cold, unforgiving metropolis. Does he teach people how to open their hearts and make their life's better through his unwavering optimism? Of course he ding-dang does! But on his way to that, he hears the tale of a Holocaust survivor and lives out an immigrant nightmare in an immediately pre-Brexit London.

Damn bears coming in here, stealing hats and marmalade from hard-working Brits.

Kidding aside, Paddington is literally a story about immigration and racism, any way you slice it. The fact that it has a brain in its head only makes it more delicious, especially because it deals with these topics on a  level any kid could understand, and as gently as possible. It encourages people to love one another in spite of their differences, and it's hard to argue with that message.

But oh, how could we have gotten so far without discussing the visual style? Paddington is a candy-colored delight, full of little details and fillips that turn the live action frame into a page ripped from a fantasy storybook. From the gloriously busy design of the pneumatic delivery tubes in a huge hall of exploration archives to the deliciously grim cutaway to an imaginary orphanage, the production design is top notch. Every surface is dripping with bold primary colors and lit with the warm glow of a long-remembered childhood dream.

Everything onscreen is perfectly precise, and yet feels homespun and inviting, like if Wes Anderson decorated a playroom. And of any movie this century, Paddington probably has the most facility with actually conveying emotion through imagery rather than dialogue. In one particularly low moment, a mural of a tree in the Browns' house has all its petals blown off, which is spectacular, but the film is full of these little moments. Everything is packed with creativity and wonder, even in little visual gags like the backs of all of Nicole Kidman's mounted, stuffed heads on the wall. I don't rightly know where director Paul King (who has mostly labored in TV comedy up to this point) got all this from, but he needs to direct every kids' movie from now on.

If this movie was a flavor of hard candy, I'd keep a dozen of them in my bag at all times.

Of course, this world would be nothing without the humans populating it, and they're all incredibly well-suited to the job. The whole Brown family is a satisfying bundle of quirks and clipped Britishisms wrapped around stock character archetypes, but the obvious standout here, other than Ben Whishaw - who maintains a sense of wide-eyed wonder without becoming grating - is by far Nicole Kidman. Her performance is incredibly sharp, all tiny little mincing movements designed to make as much impact as possible with ruthless efficiency. She's an incredibly retrained, genuinely scary presence that generates a significant amount of tension all while indulging in constant moments of laugh-out-loud absurdity.

So, there you go. Don't judge a book by its cover, I guess. Or don't judge a movie by the cover of the book it's based on. Paddington has no right to be as thoroughly delightful as it is, but when it comes down to it, it's an actual cinema masterpiece that works on every single level it's asked to work on, as well as a couple dozen more it tacks on just for fun.

TL;DR: Paddington is a downright delightful children's movie, and I'm so glad we have the capacity to make something like it in this cold modern world.

Rating: 9/10

Word Count: 1301
Reviews In This Series
Paddington (King, 2014)
Paddington 2 (King, 2018)

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)