![]() maybe it's a late-series wobble before a final sprint to the finish line. Respect has to be paid.īut faking excitement at what happens in the films themselves is now impossible for any sentient person. Almost single-handedly, JK Rowling's creation has rescued cinema attendance figures in this country and the British producer-wizards like David Heyman and Tanya Seghatchian, who spotted the big-screen potential of Potter 10 years ago, probably deserve some sort of industry medal. ![]() Perhaps it is ungrateful to fall out of love, or at any rate out of like, with the Potter films. And, heaven knows I was an incredible suck-up at school, but I don't think I ever called the masters "Sir" quite as often as Harry does. For all the saucer-eyed commentary about how much darker and tougher and realer the new Potter is supposed to be, it is still really about as dark as the adventures of Timmy Tiptoes, and the young leads still look basically as demure and agreeable as when they were knee-high to a one-sixth scale model of Bonnie Langford. But frankly their acting style and behaviour haven't grown up all that much here. It is certainly extraordinary to think how the three cast principals have grown up, in real time, before our very eyes. Yet due diligence has to be paid to the HP source, and to its hyper-alert fanbase. It all lasts for a solid two-and-a-half hours, of which around 60 minutes is dramatically superfluous. These spiritual battles are complicated by the burgeoning agonies of adolescent love, and there is some U-certificate copping off. Huh? That gets my vote for the 2010 MTV movie award: best WTF moment.Īs Harry Potter returns to Hogwarts - and oh, merciful Jesus, how often have I typed out those last six words - he finds himself facing a redoubled threat of evil from Lord Voldemort, and a dark secret must be elicited from a new teacher, Horace Slughorn, genially played by Jim Broadbent, and the powers of wickedness appear to reside, ambiguously, in Severus Snape, played by Alan Rickman, and Harry's nasty, pasty-faced fellow pupil, Draco Malfoy (Tom Felton). There is a very surreal sequence here, when the main action is suspended so that Harry and Hagrid can attend what appears to be the funeral of a gigantic spider. And as the books get longer towards the end of the saga, attempts to cram in all those disjointed episodes into a conventional feature-length film look curiouser and curiouser. ![]() Every term at Hogwarts is Groundhog term. But the reserve of goodwill is running low the spell is wearing off, and it is tricky, to say the least, to remember how the previous movie is supposed to have ended and how this new one is supposed to advance some overarching series plotline. It's like a theme-park ride - perhaps that's what each film is now.īack in 2001, with Philosopher's Stone, the series started with a colossal rush of excitement and attending that very first screening amid legions of ecstatic children was thrilling and even moving. ![]() Probably the only really good moment in this film is a whooshing camera-move at the very beginning that sweeps us, airborne, through London's West End, past the Millennium Bridge miraculously through into Diagon Alley. Once, I believed that the films could theoretically convert newcomers to fanhood, but they are actually for signed-up fans only: competently managed big-screen renderings of a lucrative brand.Īs drama, they are becoming more and more inert, crammed with tiny events and minor characters that are spurious, pointless and, frankly, dull. But I feel an inexorable disenchantment with this franchise settling in, a sense of familiarity and stamina-loss amounting to a crisis of Potterist faith. This latest Potter has some spectacular imagery, and director David Yates is a safe pair of hands there are some nice moments and the tragic ending lands with a crash of timpani. But who knows? Maybe that second half will be split, and then the second half of that will separate, and like characters in a lost paradox by the pre-Socratic thinker Zeno, cinemagoers will never actually reach the end of the Potter films. The seventh and final volume, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, is reportedly going to be divided into two films. ![]() Half-Blood Prince is the penultimate book, but antepenultimate movie. D arker, more hormonal, more teenage-angsty and sadly more boring, the Potter franchise is back. ![]()
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