Spooky Magical Adventure Children's Fantasy Maintains High Quality Of Harry Potter Series

Rating: 6/10 (26 August 2007)

Harry Potter returns to Hogwarts, which is hosting the Tri-Wizard Tournament, a noted test of magical strength. Harry is mysteriously entered in the competition and must battle it out through dangerous trials. Worse still, he is having dark dreams which forewarn him that his old nemesis, Lord Voldemort, is close at hand and gaining strength ...
The fourth Harry Potter film is both better and worse than its predecessors. It's better in that it's a more self-contained story which it plunges straight into, but it's worse for the same reason - it ditches all the introductions and a lot of the previous characters and it doesn't really have a beginning or an end; the competition is really just a backdrop for the overarching story of Voldemort's return. It's still bags of fun though, with all the brilliant imagination of J.K. Rowling's writing - a duel with a dragon, a spell that turns Harry into a webby fish-boy, three Unforgivable Curses, a mind-maze - and the consistent quality of film-making is as high as before, with excellent photography, production design and visual effects. The score this time is by Christopher Doyle, and he pulls off the tricky feat of incorporating the existing themes within a much darker, growling symphonic sound that brings out the grim direction of the plot. As with all the previous films there is an incredible extended cast of wonderful players with one outstanding - here it's Brendan Gleeson as the one-eyed, one-legged, potion-swigging, barmy Dark Arts teacher Alastor "Mad-Eye" Moody, the pivotal character. Gleeson gets it right on the money - physically he plays it as mad as march-hare, but dramatically completely straight, exactly the way good fantasy should be. There are also good turns from Richardson as the unpalatable tabloid hack Rita Skeeter, De La Tour as an unlikely giantess, Oldman as a special-effect in a fireplace and Fiennes as the serpentine uber-villain You Know Who. Overall, I think the law of diminishing returns applies to this series, as it usually does in movies, but it still has more than enough good ideas and intriguing characters to justify itself. Good fun. Dedicated to casting director Mary Selway, a key figure in the British film industry, who worked on about a hundred films since the sixties.