Movie Rant of the Day: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

Now to establish my credentials.  I am a Harry Potter fan.  It is entirely possible that the only reason I even became a children’s librarian was because of Joanne Rowling.  I read the first two Harry Potter books in England in college and came back proselytizing the Word of Harry to the unaware Yankee masses.  Years later I would go to library school and find this knowledge invaluable in my chosen profession.  And at the beginning of August I will even have a discussion of fan sites in my library with Melissa Anelli, one of the wiz-kids behind the major Harry Potter fan site The Leaky Cauldron.

I am a fan.  I like Harry Potter.  I know Harry Potter.  And this, sir, was no Harry Potter.  It was slow.  It was boring.  It added elements that were superfluous at best, removed elements that were necessary, gave away a twist for the final film, and generally was perhaps the least successful Harry Potter film in the series thus far.  This isn’t to say I didn’t enjoy watching it on some level.  But I did have to keep reminding myself why I was there.  This is less a review than a rant.  So let the expletives begin!

Let’s start at the very beginning.  The movie opens with the destruction of at least one Muggle bridge and the like by three malevolent pillars of fast moving smoke.  One of these is Bellatrix LaStrange.  One is the werewolf Fenrir Greyback.  And one is this unnamed nobody who, nonetheless, seems to be in every scene with the other two.  In any case, we’ve cut out the discussion between the Minister of Magic and the actual Prime Minister of England, which is fine.  Out it goes.  But our next scene is of Harry in a subway diner hitting on a waitress there.

Ah yes, thinks I.  The romance.  I’d heard that they’d decided that this Harry Potter was going to be romance crazy.  The problem is, I can’t actually watch Harry Potter hitting on women without thinking of these scenes from Extras where Daniel Radcliff keeps trying to pick up older women.  I half expected Harry to pull out an opened condom and stuff it surreptitiously into his pocket.

Into Harry’s life comes Dumbledore (or more accurately the guy who is seriously putting Harry off his game).  Dumbledore explains that they need to go somewhere and, in the poorly lit subway, shows Harry that his hand might be blackened.  I’m not entirely certain if it is or not since the scene is so horribly lit that the hand is essentially in shadow anyway.  But since I’ve read the book I know all about it, so that’s fine (sorry first-time movie goers).

They find Slughorn next and the CGI in this scene is just excellent.  Jim Broadbent?  A great actor.  And that’s the thing about the film.  In almost every case the acting was superb.  Broadbent’s performance was possibly the best, but I was just universally entranced by almost everyone.  Tom Felton in particular did a particularly good turn as Malfoy.  Of course, this may be due in large part to the fact that for most of the film we keep cutting to Malfoy looking glum.  Glum glum glum.  Glum at dinner.  Glum in a tower.  Glum in a little room with a little bird.  Glum.  But when he’s not glum he’s great.

Anywho, Harry is next taken to a fetid swamp that has suddenly sprung up around the Weaseley home.  This swamp seems to have been added for the sole purpose of an upcoming action sequence that is not in the book but was plopped in halfway through the film.  The moviemakers then explain away the whole cabinet in Hogwarts problem rather cleverly, I think.  Malfoy just takes a cabinet with him to the school.  Nicely done. However, he seems to detest Snape while there, and this is never explained.

Once at school it’s all wuvvy wuvvy wuv.  Ginny is apparently dating Dean Thomas, though the most Ginny/Dean screen time we see is a distant smooching piece in The Three Broomsticks where Harry doesn’t appear to be the least bit upset by the action.  In contrast, Jessie Cave who plays Lavender Brown gives a dead on fabulous performance.  You truly do believe that she and Ron are all hormones and nothing much else. And full credit to Emma Watson for her performance as someone whose heart is breaking.

School continues and the script sort of cuts out most of the sequences where Harry and Dumbledore look at Voldemort’s past.  That’s fine (my husband likes to call these the "exposition bowl" parts anyway) though it’ll be interesting seeing how the screenwriters allow the characters to figure out that Voldemort liked to put pieces of his soul in objects belonging to the original founders of Hogwarts.  I was a little sad to see that you never get a glimpse of young Tom Riddle’s real affection for the Hogwarts School too.  I think that’s an important detail to get down.  Ah well.

There were a couple changes to the script that made perfect sense to me.  You know how on the Hogwarts train Malfoy freezes Harry and covers him with his own invisibility cloak?  Then Harry is discovered by Tonks… which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense when you think about it.  Well, now it’s Luna who finds him, and as she did in the previous film Evanna Lynch is marvelous.  She just makes you happy whenever she’s on-screen.  I suspect that when she’s kidnapped in the next Harry Potter film that it will be her disappearance that really makes you bite your nails.  Nobody wants to see Luna hurt.  Not this Luna anyway.

Other changes weren’t so hot.  Once the Christmas holidays roll around Harry’s at the Weaseleys.  Then Bellatrix and Fenrir appear (hunhuna?) and we have a strange chase sequence through the reeds of the previously non-existent swamp.  Nothing really happens.  For that matter, Fenrir is never described as a werewolf.  The dude doesn’t have a single line.  He just sort of regards Ginny in a nasty way then takes off in a puff of smoke.  Oh, and Bellatrix burns down the Weaseley home for no particular reason.  We have a shot of Mrs. Weaseley looking sad.  So just in case she doesn’t have enough of a reason to dislike Bellatrix for threatening her daughter in the last movie we can assume that she doesn’t like her because she turned her home into a pile of ashes.  Or something.

On the plus side, I liked the use of snow in this particular film.  Quidditch in the snow = good stuff.  Who knew?  Strangely there isn’t any snow near that Weaseley home, but make of that what you will.

Back at Hogwarts, Harry cuts up Malfoy with a nasty spell learned from his Potions book, but we never really see any repercussions from that.  Nothing aside from the world’s most awkward kiss with Ginny in the Room of Requirement where they are hiding the book.  It’s one of those scenes where the music changes and suddenly you are aware that in spite of the lack of chemistry between the actors (and the creepiness of the setting) love is in the air.

On the plus side, soon Harry is drinking the potion that will give him one good day, and Radcliff has an excuse to break out his comedic talents.  The kid is really very funny.  Very funny and very droll.

Eventually the end arrives.  Harry arrives with Dumbledore in the cave where Voldemort’s locket is hidden.  How did they know to go to this cave?  No idea.  They’re just there (after a necessary but awkward line about how Dumbledore is able to disapparate from Hogwarts when no one else can).  In the cave we find that the pedestal in the center of the lake is built on Fortress of Solitude-type dirty crystals.  Dumbledore drinks, fails to say "Don’t hurt them!  Take me instead!" and then there’s a nice Harry vs. the zombies sequence.  The zombies, to my mind, were basically just an army of Gollums, but my husband thought they were neat.

In any case, after this the big showdown with Malfoy happens, only with a twist.  In the book, Harry is frozen by Dumbledore and has his cloak thrown over him (this happens to him a lot).  In this case, Dumbledore just tells Harry to go one floor down.  And Harry, docile as a lamb, does so.  Bad guys enter but even when Dumbledore asks for their names Bellatrix refuses so we STILL never know it’s Fenrir.  Showdown happens, and then Alan Rickman has to go and give away the whole twist of the next film.  Bear in mind that I love Rickman.  Hot as they come, that one.  But in this particular film he seems to be purring all his lines.  He never gets angry.  Never yells.  The confidence he has in the book when he does the unbreakable vow with Narcissa Malfoy is gone here.  He looks vaguely worried at all times.  It got to the point where when Harry says to Slughorn that he and Snape don’t get along you’re left saying, "Why????  You seem to get on splendidly in all your scenes together!"  And Rickman continues to downplay everything here.  First he indicates that Harry should be quiet.  Then he goes up the stairs, Dumbledore says "please" very nicely, Snape takes about 100 years looking regretful, kills Dumbledore, then spends another 100 years looking sad. No one in the world would mistake him for a bad guy at this point. 

After that, the bad guys merrily waltz out of Hogwarts without difficulty.  In what feels like a last minute add-on, some random guy says "stop" to them in the Great Hall and is blasted out of the way.  What could have been exciting ends up a leisurely stroll.  Harry eventually works himself out of his lethargy enough to follow.  He screams at Snape who vaguely purrs back in response.  Scream.  Purr.  Scream.  Purr.  And when Snape says that he is the half-blood prince, you have no idea what that means since it is never mentioned that his mother’s last name was "Prince".

Oh.  And Bellatrix sets Hagrid’s hut on fire.  Does Hagrid make it out?  Does Fang?  No idea!  Not the point.  I mean, he must since he’s in the next scene, but who knows where he was?

In the final scene, Harry and Hermione talk about the next step while Ron, for reasons unclear, sits way way out of the frame behind them.  You’re sort of left wondering if Rupert Grint forgot to show up for the taping that day.  Now one of my husband’s problems with the movie was that there were very few inserts.  Which is to say, when Harry shows Hermione the note in the locket, we just see her reading it.  We don’t see the note close up.  It’s like we’re watching a stage play of some sort.

Badda bing, badda boom.  Movie done.

I wonder about folks who haven’t read the books and have only seen the Harry Potter movies.  There must be some out there, right?  Well good luck to them if there are, since this film very much worked on the assumption that you had read the books, knew this story frontwards and back, and you would be able to fill in all missing details and elements yourself.

But the worst crime of all?  It was dull.  I mean, really dull.  Slow and not very quick.  It would pick up for a moment here and there, and then fall back into boredom again.  My excuse is that Kloves and Yates are just off their games here and will pick up considerably for the next two films (since they’re splitting the last book in twain).  One hopes so, since this wasn’t what I had hoped for.  No ghosts.  No moving paintings.  No real threat of Voldemort (he’s never seen and only alluded too once in a while, mostly in terms of his past crimes).