Firebolt... the Freshmaker (some SPOILERs)

Rating: Null/10 (10 June 2004)

All of the shots were much too tight.
It ruined any epic sense of the two previous movies.
There was also the extremely short length of the shots which had the same effect on the epic sense.
Without that epic sense, it lost most of it's wonderous and magical feel.
The castle, which was made to feel enormous in the first two felt like a small closet in this one. Even the groundskeeper's grounds seemed reduced in scale on a now very steep hillside.
But the movie really didn't need a big castle because there wasn't much focused on the experience. Any existential qualities were killed by the goal-orientedness of it's lack of well crafted transitions, and it's unnecessarily fast pace. (It is supposed to be a full year.)
Gone too was a decent musical score. This really crippled any epic feel that the film might have had.
This along with the uniforms, (or even non-muggle clothing!) are no longer worn most of the time, so any timeless feel to the movie is gone. This too ultimately killed the epic sense of the movie.
Sprinkle in a few hand-held shots for that $159.95 effect and you got yourself something that should anger and offend nearly every Harry Potter fan.
But the ending had to be the worst. A freeze-frame closeup on a smile? This is something out of Starsky and Hutch! I thought: "why the hell would any director want to do that?" I later read that he did that because it was part of his signature.
It was so bad too me, it was as if his signature could of been ending with tap dancing hillbillies dancing and bowing, or maybe the porky pig cartoon ending. I remember the urge to stand up and shout "Nooooooooooo!" overwhelmed me.
It was as if he urinated on the entire movie so that everyone would know that it was his. I personally would have used Alan Smithee's signature instead.
Before Azkaban, I thought that there would never be a remake of the series. Now, I am sure that there will be one years from now. Chris Columbus deserves better than to have a spectacular start destroyed.
This was by far the best book of the five, and so far, it is the worst movie.