Could have been great, but as always it wasn't

Rating: Null/10 (4 August 2004)

The Harry Potter movies have never got special treatment from their Directors. It's fair to say also they were never treated in the same way the Lord of the Rings was but Harry Potter has time against it where Peter Jackson had the money and the time to play around to make it the masterpiece it became. When reading every Harry Potter book you can easily believe that they could be even better than the Lord of the Rings Trilogy with all the twist and turns every thread hole of the story has and thats not including the amount of characters portrayed through the mammoth story. Philosopher's Stone was good, Chamber of Secrets was very Good and Prisoner of Azakaban was Good but not great. When Gary Oldman comes into the picture , it is where the films begins to become what we had hoped but till then I think there was huge cuts made in parts where questions were left unanswered. I know there is always an occurring argument over the films and how much they miss out from the books but this films was nearly twenty minutes shorter than The Chamber of Secrets so they could have easily added more scenes to the films to make up the time. Film distributors believe that for a child to watch a film then it must be short in time but a child gets lost in films and as long as the film is Magical like Harry Potter then they get lost and have no idea what time even means when watching something like this.

It was obvious that scenes were filmed and then cut but that's filmmaking for you and it is something which cannot be overseen and one day we may and probably will see extended cuts of the Harry Potter franchise, I hope anyway, but what is The Prisoner of Azkaban really like?
Daniel Radcliffe has grown up and is very angry. When he is angry though he grinds his teeth and ends up looking quite stupid but kid's his age actually do that because I remember doing so, so that can be forgiven. Ron did not really have a big part like the previous two but Hermione did. David Thewlis as Lupin was brilliant, Gary Oldman as Sirus was just great old Gary Oldman and Michael Gambon was very good as a more active Dumbeldore. Overall this was a good film and Alfonso did a great job but he should stick to his Mexican independent movies. I still blame Chris Columbus for these mistakes though as he is not Mr Adventure man like Peter Jackson or even Spielberg.
We are all in love with Harry Potter but there is something deep inside us all that believe we are not getting what we deserve. It's taken a long time for me to come up with what I really think about these movies and I have come to the conclusion that they are just ok. Kids who range from the age between 5 and 12 who will go on in life and remember Harry Potter as the film they grew up on. I am 21 so the films I remember as a young child was The Goonies and The Monster Squad. We have another four films left to come and we have to have our fingers crossed that next four will hopefully become groundbreaking masterpieces like they should be, but I think we all know there is little chance of this ever happening.