Okay, but disappointing

Rating: 3/10 (22 July 2011)

After the dull abyss that was The Deathly Hallows Part 1, I didn't think that Part 2 would really be much better. And it really wasn't. I have no idea how it got an 8.5 rating.
I have enjoyed the Harry Potter films, although I have never read the Books. However, I have found the films to be poorly written. The scriptwriters seems to eschew actual narrative and instead just drop scenes in here and there.
*HERE BE SPOILERS* Firstly, the plot holes. So the elder wand is this awesome powerful device. Except it doesn't really do much at all. Well, okay. Maybe "powerful" is a metaphor for something else. And the wand apparently serves Harry, not Voldemort, although that really doesn't make any functional difference at all. Poor writing. The Order of the Pheonix is destroyed, apparently. I'm not sure when that happened, exactly, since they never bothered to show that to the audience, and all the members are still alive til the end. Part 1 ended with no cliffhanger, and the whole subplot of the Deathly Hallows was largely irrelevant. The elder wand was pointless. The resurrection stone didn't make any sense. The invisibility cloak didn't even show up as far as I can recall.
The end result is that it's okay. The acting is the same as all the others, the special effects the same and so forth. Thankfully they kept the same actors throughout the series. The real problem is that the filmmakers never bothered to build a strong narrative. It's fast paced, but shallow.
My guess is that they tried to save all the interesting parts til Part 2. However, the functional result is that Part 1 sucked and sucked and they spent an hour in a tent doing nothing, and Part 2 had too much to cover to make a powerful narrative. What should have happened is a more even spacing of events.
6 out of 10.