The penultimate Harry Potter is unimpressive.
The penultimate book in J K Rowling’s Potter series, Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, is a dramatic read for largely two reasons: Potter is led into chief rival Lord Voldemort’s past, and he loses one of his closest confidants. It’s hugely disappointing, then, that the film adaptation, which released worldwide on July 15, treats the plot with little urgency, offering, instead, a limp two-and-a-half hours of Muggle cinema.
The Potter series has been believed to progress into darker realms with each film, but your reviewer, for one, hasn’t been able to tell the difference. The first one, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, released in 2001, worked remarkably well because it was a first. We were curious to see it all on the big screen. Potter, played by Daniel Radcliffe, then seemed a fitting bespectacled hero, eyes open wide with a fetchingly bewildered expression, lightening scar on the forehead, flanked by his two best friends, Hermione Granger (Emma Watson) and Ron Weasely (Rupert Grint). Director Chris Columbus did a fine job of the adaptation — the drama, the magic, the suspense was brought to life with a flourish.
This time, with director David Yates (BAFTA and Emmy award-winning filmmaker) at the helm, Potter and his two friends appear embarassingly awkward. Their dialogue delivery is flat and rarely manages to bring to screen the close bond and hearty camaraderie they share in the books. In their sixth year at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, Potter sets out to fetch a vital memory concerning Lord Voldemort from Horace Slughorn, the new professor of “potions” at the school. This memory holds the key to how the dark lord can be destroyed. Meanwhile, Potter’s rival, Draco Malfoy (Tom Felton, who has grown fairly well into his role) has been entrusted by the dark wizard with a task he is determined to fulfill.
One wonders what a non-reader of Potter books would make of the film. Rowling has always been generous with details and background fillers in her books, which are important to understand the plot fully, and perhaps equally difficult to adapt to screen. However, what Yates is unable to do with this adaptation, he pulls off rather stylishly with some fabulous special effects and seamless cinematography; which is all very pleasing indeed. Watch the sheer magnanimity with which Dumbledore creates a ring of fire to ward off an inferi attack at a lake where he, along with Potter, has gone in search of a horcrux (an object that contains a piece of Voldemort’s soul). Yates also scores with his set of veteran actors. Like in the previous films, Alan Rickman in the role of the hissing Professor Snape is first-rate, as is Maggie Smith playing Professor McGonagall. Jim Broadbent, as Professor Slughorn, is very good, too. Among the younger lot, Hero Fiennes-Tiffin and Frank Dillane as young Voldemort are excellent; their sly smiles and subtle touches indicating the makings of a dark lord are perfectly in place.
There is perhaps a certain maturity and subtlety that is intended in this film, a possible subtext to Potter finally taking his job as “the chosen one” more seriously than he did before. In the process, however, the film leaves much to be desired; the screenplay is stilted and often boring. The snogging and teenage romance, meant to be one of the highlights in the film, seems out of place. It’s also worth wondering why a few arbitrary scenes are given more screen time than something as important as the coming out of the half-blood prince (it’s in the title, for heaven’s sake!), which is reduced to a non-event. Furthur, the death of Dumbledore, that fans mourned for months, a climatic moment second only to the final duel between Potter and Voldemort in the last book, is reduced to a few minutes of relatively sombre wand-pointing and muttering. The film doesn’t justify the fuss created around it.