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movie news
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Wed. 07 15. 2009 10:05 AM EDT
'Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince': Snogwarts, By Kurt Loder
The great series hits a speed bump.
Daniel Radcliffe in "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince"
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Warner Bros.
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"Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" is one of the darkest of the Potter books, so it's no surprise that the movie version is the darkest of the films to date. What is surprising
— and I say this as someone who loves the books and has loved the movies up to this point — is how sluggish the new picture is. It gets underway with a limp scene set in a train-station café — a trivial flirtation between Harry, now 16, and an admiring waitress — and proceeds in surges and sags for the next two and a half hours. There are some marvelous scenes, beautiful images, wonderful moments — it isn't a "bad" movie by any reckoning. But it isn't up to the sweeping dynamic level of some of the pictures that preceded it.
Every fan knows the story: Darkness is descending on Hogwarts and all of the wizarding world. Voldemort's Death Eaters are on the attack, and have even crossed over into the unsuspecting Muggle domain. The Dark Lord has tasked Draco Malfoy (Tom Felton, newly prominent) with an especially evil mission. Albus Dumbledore (Michael Gambon) is in mortal danger, as, of course, is Harry (Daniel Radcliffe). And the deliciously creepy Professor Snape (Alan Rickman) appears to be up to even more in the way of no-good than usual. As if that weren't enough, there's suddenly a Horcrux crisis, too. (Need it be said that this isn't the place for first-timers to attempt to enter the Potter universe?)
J.K. Rowling's book is more than 650 pages long; compression was obviously unavoidable and no doubt exceedingly tricky. Still, Potterphiles may wonder why some key plot elements have been shortchanged while others, less crucial, have been played up. We're told, for example, that Snape has finally been put in charge of the school's Defense Against the Dark Arts course (at last!). But why do we not see him teaching a class — one with Harry in it? (This is kind of important.) And some illuminating Horcrux detail gets lost in the consolidation of the story's Pensieve episodes. Then there's the fierce struggle, radically truncated here, that results in the death of a Major Character (forgive the ambiguity, but you never know) — a loss that passes with a curious minimum of emotional embroidery.
On the other hand, a subsidiary theme in the book — the hormonal rumpus among the Hogwarts kids now that they're in their middle teens — has been inflated to an extent that would suggest crass demographic pandering if director David Yates and writer Steve Kloves didn't seem too classy a pair to stoop to such things. Ron Weasley (Rupert Grint) is being stalked by Gryffindor hottie Lavender Brown (Jessie Cave), much to the dismay of Hermione Granger (Emma Watson), who, as we've noted in earlier installments, has eyes for Ron herself. Hermione, meanwhile, has been targeted by Quidditch lug Cormac McLaggen (Freddie Stroma). And Harry is finally getting together in a serious way with Ginny Weasley (Bonnie Wright), Ron's sister. There is thus a lot of snogging going on — a bit more than necessary, perhaps, to make the point. (One of the picture's loveliest shots says it all, really — and more: It's a long, winding camera move up around a Hogwarts tower, gliding slowly past Ron and Lavender in mid-embrace and then continuing its ascent to settle on Draco, on a high balcony, brooding darkly in the gathering night.)
There's one significant new character on hand: Professor Horace Slughorn (Jim Broadbent), a former Potions teacher who years ago numbered among his students Tom Riddle — the embryonic Voldemort. (Riddle's childhood incarnation is played by the unsettlingly sinister Hero Fiennes Tiffin.) Slughorn has been in hiding from the Death Eaters, but Dumbledore lures him back to his old job and assigns Harry to get close to him in order to plumb his memory for desperately needed information. Nobody does avuncular muddling better than Broadbent; still, compared to previous guest wackos in the series like Kenneth Branagh's Gilderoy Lockhart and Brendan Gleeson's "Mad-Eye" Moody, Horace lacks electrical presence. The vivacity gap is further widened by the absence of dastardly Lucius Malfoy (currently confined to the Azkaban wizard prison) and Voldemort himself (who'll be back, of course). And some of the most beloved Potter characters get only token face time: Professors Lupin (David Thewlis) and McGonagall (Maggie Smith); the imposing Hagrid (Robbie Coltrane); the cranky Filch (David Bradley); and the wily Weasley twins, Fred and George (James and Oliver Phelps). By the time the gloriously spacey Luna Lovegood (Evanna Lynch) pops into a shot wearing some sort of giant lion hat on her head, we're so starved for light-hearted whimsy that we want to hug her (and not let her go).
The film's production design, once again by Stuart Craig, is as wondrously detailed as ever. And the sequence in which Dumbledore leads Harry by boat across a dark underground lake to a small island, where they're attacked by a throng of hideous, Gollum-like Inferi, is as uncannily beautiful as any episode in the Potter world. But as in many other passages of the film, the color is drained so far down into a spectral blue that it sometimes verges on murk. And while there's a sufficiency of the action-magic familiar from earlier films — wizard duels and such — the element of magical enchantment that's always distinguished the series appears to have been mislaid. "Wands out, Harry," Dumbledore says at the beginning. By the time you reach the movie's ominous conclusion, you may wish that someone had given the picture itself one final wand-over before sending it out into the canon.
Don't miss Kurt Loder's review of "(500) Days of Summer," also new in theaters this week.
This report is from MTV News.
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