The spell is almost right.

Rating: 9/10 (11 November 2002)

Last year amid the hoopla of the release of Harry Potter And The Sorcerer's
Stone, movie goers forgot what made the books wonderful and clamored for a
visual representation of a book they had grew to love. What they got was a fun movie, but one that had the emotion and spirit of the book sucked away by a
page-by-page direct translation to the screen.
In Chamber Of Secrets it is very apparent that Chris Columbus and company
have learned from their first experience and have produced a superior product. The spirit is intact this time around with Harry having a much darker and more intense adventure. In fact, it may be too intense for some kids. There are some legitimately scary areas of the film including a harrowing escape from giant
spiders and a fight to the death with the monster that is petrifying the students at Hogwarts.
At the other end of the wand though is a great mystery adventure that is in-line with the great Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew stories that non-readers of the
series can follow. Plus it helps that the cast is so terrific. Daniel Radcliffe improves himself and expands the character of Harry Potter. Emma Watson is
superb as Hermione and Rupert Grint is just hilarious as Ron Weasley. The rest of the original cast is back as well with another quirky yet humorous portrayal of Snape.
But since this is a new book there are bound to be new characters including the animated Doby the house elf and some other teachers who appear in the book,
but we haven't seen until now. The stand out is the new Defense Against The
Dark Arts teacher, Gilderoy Lockhart, who is played to pompous perfection by
Kenneth Branagh. In fact, it is almost worth the price of the movie just to see him flitter around like the peacockish fop that he is. Just brilliant.
There is a major problem with the film though: the ending. It is immensely corny and hackneyed and takes you right out of the story. It just doesn't belong. It's almost as if Columbus, having already resigned as director, just gave up and
came back home to America. The events that happen are not worthy of J.K.
Rowling's books or of this fun and entertaining film.