Weak and Overly Fast-Paced

Rating: 5/10 (22 November 2005)

The latest rendition of the Harry Potter books is not quite as intriguing as the last three. While the casting and acting remained excellent, there were several poor directorial decisions that ultimately contributed to weakness of the film.
It makes sense that story must be changed from the book, especially since the fourth book in J.K. Rowling's series extraordinarily long, but the filmmakers made several poor choices in developing the plot of the film out of the story of the book.
The most unfortunate of these decisions was the elimination of several key character-developments and plot elements in favor of longer action sequences that have more computer generated animation. While the special effects are wonderful, I think that the films were better when there was a smaller budget and they had to limit the amount of CG effects. In changing several scenes subtly, especially during the Tri-Wizard tournament, the filmmakers did little justice to the humour, the mystery and the magic of the story. Instead of amusing the audience with fun little character elements and quick, witty lines, it seemed like much more time was spent WOW'ing the viewers with epic chase scenes and battles.
The first thing I noticed when watching the film was that every scene seemed cut off and abrupt. They limited the dialog to what was absolutely necessary, and over used boring, "epic" shots of things that were not particularly interesting.
My main concern is for the fact that, alone, it does not stand up as a film. Even having watched the previous three films in succession immediately before this one, there are so many things left out of the plot that viewers will be utterly confused as to what is going on. This once more comes down to the decision to replace the finer details of the story with wild and crazy special effects.
The next problem with the film that I foresee is the issue regarding future-proofing the plot. In eliminating so many details, the director has done one of two things. He has either set up the next three films to have few details much like this one, as they have nothing to build on, or they will have to be much longer than the past ones, to explain the key plot elements that were left out of this one. Certain key points were excluded from the film, leaving them to be explained by what the viewer remembered from the books, which ultimately yields a rather weak final product.
I was extremely disappointed by the outcome of this film, as the fourth book was my favorite of the six available currently. On the whole the film did little more than create a bridge between "young Harry" in books One through Three, and "Older Harry" in books Five through Seven. It's really unfortunate that they made this bridge in such a way, as it had the potential to be the best of them yet.
-R66