Hurry up Harry! (with thanks to Sham 69!)

Rating: 5/10 (6 May 2008)

I quite like the Harry Potter books and try to read the novel of the film before-hand and so approached "Order Of The Phoenix", wondering like many, just how the director could cut a 700 page novel into a just over two hours movie. The conclusion I draw is, very unconvincingly, so much so that it's no surprise to me to learn that the production team behind this money-spinning franchise plan to split the last humungously large novel into two parts. That's not to say that JK Rowling's writing couldn't do with some pruning for the big screen, but certainly on the evidence of this poorly edited instalment, I'm more in favour of the double-up plan. There's's also the dread element of inherent formula-ism, dictated of course by the source novels, following as usual the path of Harry encountering his magical friends and / or enemies in the neighbourhood of Little Whinging, displacement to Hogworts, his in-out tribulations with friends Hermione and Ron, interaction with teachers good and bad, winding up with a big, dramatic climax where nothing is resolved one way or the other - Voldemort always lives to fight another day. It must have been almost impossible for the director to do any more with these base elements than is conjured up here, but even with the introduction of the mildest of love interest (from out of nowhere, or so the film would have it) between Harry and Cho, a reasonably malevolent turn by Imelda Staunton as on-the-make Black Arts teacher, Dolores Umbridge and the death at the finale of Harry's beloved godparent, Sirius, the film fails to engage leaving the viewer breathless at the end, certainly admiring of the SFX on show but ultimately dissatisfied that Harry and his cohorts get to the end of the film in no more danger than the last. Victims of the breakneck editing of the piece, to the best of my recollection, are, besides the wholesale extraction of the Quidditch tournament which sees Ron humiliated then redeemed as goal-minder, a series of key scenes that are almost butchered in the rush to get to the end. These include, as hinted earlier, the lack of any meaningful build-up to Harry's kiss with Cho, the revealing of her later complicity in ratting to Umbridge of Harry's behind-her-back dark arts lessons to his school chums, Voldemort's attack on the Weasleys' father, the session with Snape which reveals Harry's parents in their bullying of the young Snape not to be the golden-couple everyone imagined them to be. Most gaping of all is the sly Staunton's fate - the last you see of her she's being whisked away by a bunch of angry centaurs, then at the resolution, you're blandly told in a newspaper montage that she's lost her position as Headteacher. Guess she got away from the centaurs unscathed then..! All this and more flies by in a blur, with very little humour to lighten the load, almost zero characterisation and at the end one feels the way you would as if you've gone through a flight-simulator type ride at a theme park rather than the real deal of an actual roller-coaster. Goodness knows how people who haven't read the novel made sense of it! Maybe the little kids will understand, as Jim Morrison once said, but the more discerning of them and the rest of us, might feel shortchanged by Harry's Gang, this time around.