Hormonal Harry impressed me a great deal
Written: Jul 16 '09
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Product Rating:
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| Bang For The Buck |
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Pros: Pretty much everything from the acting to the pacing.
Cons: None serious enough to mention.
The Bottom Line: Given the tough decisions that had to be made with regards to what to ditch and what to keep, this is the best Potter movie so far.
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| wrestler's Full Review: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince |
To put it almost delicately, the manure and the hormones hit the fan in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. We are nearing the end of what has been one of the most successful book adaptation series to the big screen, and deservedly so. The Potter universe is getting darker all around and since the books don't get any shorter, the editing choices become harder. Therefore, I dare say that considering the difficulty of the task at hand for director David Yates, this is positively the best film of the entire Potter movie series.
Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint and Emma Watson return as inseparable friends Harry, Ron and Hermione as they get set to begin their sixth year at Hogwarts school of witchcraft and wizardry. As usual, danger looms, this time in the form of the evil Lord Voldemort's minions, the death eaters (Ralph Fiennes' Voldemort is himself absent from the film). The movie allows us to get more familiar with them, especially with the seriously deranged Bellatrix Lestrange (Helena Bonham Carter).
Harry, Ron and Hermione find themselves spying on Lestrange, another death eater called Greyback (Dave Legeno) and Harry's eternal nemesis Draco Malfoy (Tom Felton). As the three heroes watch, Malfoy is being initiated into something, what it is they don't know. Soon, Malfoy ambushes Harry as he eavesdrops on a conversation while the train is taking them back to school.
Speaking of school, the movie spends very little time in the classroom, and most of it is in the potions course with new professor Horace Slughorn (Jim Broadbent). The film starts out with Headmaster Albus Dumbledore (Michael Gambon) summoning Harry to help persuade Slughorn to come teach at Hogwarts. We soon learn Dumbledore's true motive for wanting Slughorn to return to Hogwarts: the headmaster wants to extract a painful memory from him, because Slughorn has corrupted the version of the memory in Dumbledore's library. The contents of the memory, Dumbledore says, are key to defeating Lord Voldemort.
Meanwhile, the series had so far centered itself around the powerful friendship between the main characters. Only difference this time is that everybody seems to want to become more than friends. Ron and Hermione are growing increasingly attracted to one another and Hermione's feelings are hurt when the slightly dafter Ron begins to date an air head, groopie-like colleague named Lavender Brown (Jessica Cave). Meanwhile, Ron's sister Ginny (Bonnie Wright) has a relationship with a fellow Gryffindor student, which serves as a mechanism to show Harry's feelings for her (oh how quickly Ginny is over him when she gets on Harry's case!).
The film also returns the series' British actors dream team to play the teachers and parents as Alan Rickman, Maggie Smith, David Thewlis, Mark Williams, Julie Walters and Robbie Coltrane are back once again. Obviously, all of these actors are tremendous but three cast members stand out from the lot. Rickman is fantastic as his character of Professor Snape takes on a new level of importance in this part of the series. Like Rickman, Michael Gambon gets a lot of screen time in this one and he steals the show as the old headmaster who clearly has more than a trick up his sleeve. I was also impressed with the incredibly well-calibrated performance of Jim Broadbent as Professor Slughorn, who refuses to release a memory he fears would destroy him.
I was also pleased by the performance of the young ones who deliver their best showings by far since the beginning of this movie series. Since the book and the script call for them to be more mature, stagnation of their progress as actors could have undermined the entire film. After being somewhat cast aside for the past two or three movies, Tom Felton makes a strong return to prominence as his Draco character is tasked with a mission that he truly wants no part of.
I am an avid reader of the Potter series and I suspect some of the editing choices will anger several Potter die-hards. Indeed, several details, characters and significantly important events are missing from the film. The only one that bugs me a little bit is that we don't get to see Professor Snape teach the Defense Against The Dark Arts class. But overall, I could hardly care less about missing details. What makes me like David Yates' effort so much is the fact that every editing choice he makes turns Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince into a character-driven movie. This is an audacious decision. It's also the right one. We are dealing with the sixth part of the series. We already know about the magic, the Quidditch and the whimsical universe. What interests us (or at least me) now is to see how these characters evolve and this is exactly what this film gives us.
As for the missing details, Yates has a two-part seventh episode to catch up on them. I'm sure Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows will carry the usual flaws (such as a sharp drop in substance) that come with having to wrap up a series, but I suspect a lot of people will like it more than this one specifically because there will be more magic, effects and so on. I suspect I won't. Yates has set himself up for a mightily ambitious finale and I'll be really impressed if he can make me like it more than I did this one. He follows up on Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, which I thought was the weakest of the Potter movies, with what I consider to the best one so far. If you've read the books and/or watched the movies, get off whatever chair or couch you're sitting on and go see Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Now.
Recommended:
Yes
Film Completeness: Looked complete to me.
Worst Part of this Film: Nothing
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Epinions.com ID:
wrestler
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Member: Alexandre Turp
Location: Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Reviews written: 163
Trusted by: 17 members
About Me:
Evolution is all that matters.
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