Film: Underwhelming; Radcliffe: Cute; Fiennes: Evil; Women: Lose

Rating: 4/10 (15 July 2007)

It amazes me that seven billion of the six billion people on the planet (slight exaggeration) are fervent Harry Potter fans.
What I may remember most from this movie is how shockingly cute I found Daniel Radcliffe. I was afraid I might be arrested upon exiting the theater. I haven't found a teenage boy that cute since I was nine years old.
The special effects were not, actually, all that special. It's all stuff we've seen before, especially the light saber tussle between Luke and Darth Vader ... sorry ... the staff fight between Gandalf and Saruman ... no, no, no. It was a magic wand battle between Dumbledore and Malfoy. And we've seen it before.
Give me Errol Flynn in a duel with Basil Rathbone: two men who knew how to handle an actual rapier, and who were engaged in a real activity that could have, with one false move, resulted in injury or death. Much more exciting. No special effects necessary.
I kept waiting to care about anything that was happening on screen. I kept waiting for the characters to stop rolling around like balls on a billiard table and actually connect. I kept waiting for the fantasy to serve as a thin veil over real life issues that I could relate to.
There were a couple of moments when it seemed that something like that might happen -- when something real might be said about Harry's struggle with Voldemort or with corrupt administrators, but at such moments Sirius or Snape would say something utterly simplistic like "Concentrate!" and I lost all hope that this movie would be anything like, say, the classic "Wizard of Oz," my all time favorite wizard movie.
Rowlings' painfully obvious simple mindedness causes me to lose faith in humanity; that her fans fall for this -- all the ugly people, like Vernon Dursley, are bad. The good looking people, with their glossy hair and excellent teeth, are good.
Deep! How did Rowling ever gain that insight! Everything is black and white. Harry is relentlessly, boringly, good. Anyone who opposes him is bad (and probably fat and with bad teeth.) Again, a classic like "Wizard of Oz" gave us complicated villains; the Wicked Witch was merely avenging her sister. The bad guys here are so one dimensional.
And it's so narcissistic. Everything revolves around Harry. That can get boring.
Rowling's misogyny is all but a hammer that beats you over the head. Her latest "I hate my own sex" character / caricature is Umbridge, who telegraphs, with her pink clothing, her clicky heels, her love of cats -- oh, everything about her, basically, is that she is some misogynist's nightmare of an old maid.
I hope at some point Rowling gives us a black villain with an Afro who speaks in Jive, and an Oriental villain with long fingernails and buckteeth. Rowling handles stereotypes so very well.
Ralph Fiennes, I think, could not give a bad performance if he tried. He's Voldemort, the villain here, and he's very good, but the director has no idea what to do with him. Fiennes has got all that complexity, intelligence, and talent, you see, and this movie simply has no room for them.