Fun, Fast-Moving, But Slightly Stilted And Doom-Laden Harry Potter Adventure

Rating: 6/10 (26 January 2008)

Harry Potter's fifth term at Hogwarts is marred by his dread that the evil Voldemort is abroad and assembling dark forces, and a rift between the wizards who believe Harry and the Ministry of Magic, which insists there is nothing to fear. Worse, the sadistic Dolores Umbridge is appointed as a new teacher and sets out to make the pupils lives a misery ...
This is the fifth Harry Potter movie, and the series is starting to flag a little under the weight of its own plotting and the familiarity of its conceits. There are at least twenty key characters in this movie, which is really about ten too much for any film, and some of the plot strands seem unnecessary (such as Hagrid's giant half-brother, or Snape's tutelage against mental invasion). Abridging weighty books for the screen - J.K. Rowling's novel is just shy of eight-hundred pages - is tricky stuff; cut out too much and it becomes incoherent, but don't cut out enough and you rush through the magic of the story. There are plenty of agreeable thrills and spills here, but nothing we haven't seen in the previous movies. The quieter moments - like the scene where Harry and Sirius reflect on the Black Family tree - are curiously more effective than the hocus-pocus extravaganzas. It's still great quality entertainment though, doubly so for fans of the books, and this one has three wacky new characters; Luna Lovegood, an agreeably weird blonde girl with whom Harry identifies, the catty, mauve-bedecked, neat-freak-psycho-headmistress Dolores Umbridge and the gleefully-named Bellatrix Lestrange, a Gothic villainess escapee from Azkaban. It also brings back a lot of earlier characters, and develops more of the kids, notably the lovably weedy Neville Longbottom and Harry's sporadic love-interest Cho Chang. All of the ensemble are good, even if a lot of them are only in one or two scenes, but Radcliffe, Gambon and Rickman especially keep it going and Oldman steals the film as the esoteric Sirius Black. If I have one main problem with this movie it's that it's a bit heavy-going, a bit like adolescent angst meets C.S. Lewis; what made the original movie so much fun was its sense of comic innocence and imagination. As the overall story moves towards some good versus evil climactic battle, I hope the films aren't going to take themselves too seriously. Good blockbuster entertainment however, with excellent production design by Stuart Craig, arguably the only major player to work on all the movies thus far.