Obviously not a great fantasy film, but surprisingly, a good one

Rating: Null/10 (28 November 2002)

This is undeniably a better film than the last one, which is odd, since it's also undeniable that the second book is the weakest in the series. But perhaps it's not so odd. The first book, after all, is at its best in the opening chapters, in which we, more or less along with Harry, discover that there's a whole world of wizards and witches, that Harry is both talented in magic and an inadvertant celebrity, etc. It was these opening chapters that Coloumbus most thoroughly muffed when he made the screen version. In the first book, nothing that happens at Hogwarts can live up to the promise of the opening; in the first film, the arrival at Hogwarts is a relief after all the dutiful but tedious exposition.
Here, Columbus doesn't even bother trying to do that which he cannot do well in any case, brings Harry to Hogwarts by the shortest route possible, and plunges into the Hogwarts story - which is, it must be admitted, a far better story than the last one. Both films conclude with Harry and companions sneaking into a kind of underground "chamber of secrets", but this quest has far less the nature of an arbitrary obstacle course; indeed, the last film had so much the nature of an arbitrary obstacle course that it might as well have been a game show.
Pretty much everything is better the second time round. The creature effects are on average better (the basilisk actually WORKS), the art direction is better, the CGI is still a bit uneven but at its worst (i.e. on the Quidditch pitch) isn't quite so purely dreadful as it was last time, and John Williams's musical score is apter and more enchanting. (His music was the best thing in the film last time, and it is again, but this time it's richer and has been applied with a good deal more taste.) Kenneth Branagh makes a marvellous Gilderoy Lockhart. A pity he's under-utilised (as is everyone, to some degree); there's nobody else with comparable energy or charm in either film. Once again John Cleese has been dragged onto the set in order to appear on screen for a minute or so and to utter perhaps ten words in total.
Columbus is still a pretty uninspired director, of course, and his dumbing down, his telling us everything twice and with words if possible so that even the slowest audience members get it, still earths the electricity we might otherwise have felt. (No doubt he dumbs down because he is making the film for children, but dumbing down for children has even less to be said for it than dumbing down for adults. If children fail to understand something, we can assume that they will grow smarter with age, and get it one day; whereas the adults too thick to get something are precisely those people who don't grow smarter with age and will never get it unless it IS dumbed down.) But all the same the direction is sharper and more assured than last time round. Columbus adheres less slavishly to the letter of Rowling's novel and the film is all the fresher for it. It's still true that more changes still should have been made. I wish Dobby had been written out of the script altogether, but given that he's there, I couldn't help longing for Columbus to summon up the courage to have him guillotined in the course of the film. I longed in vain.