Fails the kid test.....

Rating: 1/10 (26 August 2007)

Having seen every Potter film theatrically at various times of the day I was always saddled with an audience full of little children. Immediately I was irritated knowing the running about, talking, asking questions etc. that seemed to happen in every Disney, family film I was going to go see. Well what happened was sheer silence and little faces glued to the screen for 2 1/2 hours which is a major achievement and this happened on films 1-4. I took my nieces who are 8 and 10 and love all things harry potter and they were bored wanting to leave. I've loved every Harry Potter film as a movie and thought they were all very good adaptations from the books, except this one. This may end up sounding like a rant but first, whatever happened to having any humor. The books have loads of humor but as each film has progressed any sense of fun or whimsy has been removed. I'm tired of all this oooh its gotta be dark these movies have gotta be dark. Yeah the books get darker but this film was joyless and boring, I saw it 3 times slept twice to try to convince myself it was me. First the film looks like they cut the budget in half, its too dark and i don't mean tone, I mean I couldn't see too much. They did some kind of desaturated film grading that made it look like some cheap sci-fi channel movie of the week knock off. I still think chamber of secrets is the darkest of all the films, with goblet of fire coming in second. Order was one of my favorite books in the series but they managed to make it the worst film, actually the only bad harry potter film. Nothing happens in this movie except *Spoiler alert (Harry has nightmares of voldemort, goes to order of pheonix where there's lots of talking about nothing, goes back to school ends up (still don't remember how) at the ministry, there's a fight, minor character dies very undramatically and its over. End spoiler.) Anyways of all the books this one had the perfect excuse to have a bad ass action sequence, the wizards duel where the adults actually get in the action, but its over before it starts. There is no momentum in this film, things just happen. The sceenplay is the main problem, second is the TV director cuz it plays like a made for TV film. It also seems they used a television director cuz they're used to shooting fast and on a way lower budget. This film felt small in the imax cinemas, All four previous entries felt like massive epics in comparison. This will be the only one I won't own on DVD.