Harry Potter and the Mansion of Tedium

Rating: Null/10 (12 November 2002)

Just what is it about "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets" that makes it so bland, so uninteresting? I walked into the cinema on Friday night feeling a certain trepidation about the new HP film. As one of the few remaining people on the planet who has never read an HP book, I wondered if spending the next two and a half hours in the company of Griffindellstumblebumhumblepiebumblebeepainintheass was really a sensible, grown-up thing to be doing. It was not long before I had my answer. No, it was not a sensible, grown-up thing to be doing. As seemingly intelligent adults all around me cracked up at the hilarious antics of Valdemort and Fiddlededee and Sultanabran, I began to feel very uncomfortable indeed. Perhaps a pillow and a cup of cocoa would have helped. Cinema seats are not designed for the sleepy. To keep me awake, there staggered across the screen a succession of much-loved British character actors. Oh, look, it's Julie Walters. And that bloke from "The Fast Show". And, oh, how lovely, it's cuddly Kenneth Branagh. Marvellous. Meanwhile our three heroes are proving, once and for all, that they cannot act. The dolt who plays Harry has two expressions: "I'm grinning" and, "I'm trying not to grin". The one who plays the other boy has one expression: "I'm going to be sick". The girl has several, and is reasonably talented, but even she looks bored in this, and possibly very annoyed that she spends the second half of the film in a coma. The plot, such as it is, can be summed up as follows: a succession of events occurs at the magical school of Hogwarts, or whatever the heck it's called. HP sorts everything out. The end. The action (and I use the term very loosely indeed) is dull and plodding. The special effects are bland and lifeless. Each scene has no relation to the one before or after it. The "climax", when it eventually arrives, is no more or less exciting than any other scene that has gone before it. The entire film feels like it's been put together at random - some spiders here, a snake here, a flying car here, blah blah blah. There is nothing magical or enchanting about this film. It is dull and inane. The only genuinely amusing moment comes when the boy who is not HP says, after the spider sequence, something along the lines of, "What was the point of that, then?" It's a very good question. The scene (which probably cost twice as much as the whole of "Monsoon Wedding" or "Ghost World") has no reason to exist. It serves no purpose. It's not even scary. The entire film is two and a half hours of nothing at all. And don't get me started on Quidditch. As in HP1, the scene involving this pointless sport looks like it has come from an entirely different film. The lighting is all wrong (being entirely computer-generated, this is not surprising, I suppose) and it jars with the rest of the movie. Two and a half hours of my life that I will never get back. You'd think, after LOTR, TPM, AOTC and Spider bloody Man, that I'd have learned my lesson, wouldn't you? Oh well. If I can spare you the horror of this tedious drivel, then those two and a half hours will not have been totally wasted.