disappointing

Rating: 6/10 (8 April 2006)

The director of 'Four Weddings and a Funeral' taking over the Harry Potter series? One would expect some of the humor and good-feeling atmosphere of his previous movies to find somehow place in the teen-Gothic series based on Rowlings nooks. What is happening is quite the contrary and to a somehow a disappointing result.
The good things to be said about this fourth installment in the series are about the effects, masterly integrated into the movie, serving well the overall atmosphere and color. I should rather say lack of color, because the world of 'Gobblet of Fire' is much darker and less exuberant than the one in the previous series. The principal characters matured, and the world is much less a universe of childhood masterly taken over by good and bad witches, but starts to look like the threatening world of adults where the destiny of any child is to arrive. Acting is good, the original casting proves itself and the three main actors do not disappoint, but age is doing its work, and we are already in pain believing that the heroes are only 14. Interesting to see how this will be solved in the next series, re-casting may become inevitable.
The main problem of 'Gobblet' is the story itself, which fails to interest and lacks continuity. It may be that if we say the previous film one week ago we would remember better what the villains are about and how menacing they really are. It's however two or three years later now, and the result is that we do not really remember why the bad guys are bad, what is Harry's family story, the mature seem too much like a parody, and the terrible things that are supposed to happen on screen look cartoonish and fail to involve the viewer. In the balance between the teenagers angst and the dragons-witch stories it is the teen story that paradoxically looks more interesting, but then, that much money put in a teenage growing story seems to be an excessive expense.