Not utterly rubbish

Rating: Null/10 (1 June 2004)

In which Harry escapes from his relatives, goes somewhere a bit weird, gets told the plot, goes to school, sorts everything out. The usual, in other words. Except, hang on a second, this time around something is different. My eyelids are not feeling incredibly heavy. Soul-crushing boredom is not infusing every fibre of my being. I'm not spending most of the film's running-time staring at the back of someone's head in an effort to get them to turn round. What on earth has happened? Until now the HP franchise was a guaranteed insomnia cure. What has gone wrong? Slick direction, a not-appalling script, even - gadzooks - tolerable performances from the kids, all are present in this latest instalment. True, the usual ingredients are also there - an endless roll-call of loveable Brit thesps (Emma, Dawn, Robbie, Maggie, etc.), banal plotting in the early stages that doesn't really make much sense, Daniel Radcliffe's impossible-to-like hero, computer-generated sequences that don't fit into the rest of the movie at all. But somehow this thing actually works. The director, Alfonso Cuaron, might be partly to blame. Cuaron has managed to bring a certain sense of threat and menace to the whole affair. The camera (or its computerised counterpart) glides eerily through a snow-bound Hogwarts school, the plot rattles along at a decent pace, the performers acquit themselves reasonably well, and one or two scenes actually look a little informal, a little relaxed, as though the people involved are perhaps even enjoying themselves. That sense of relaxed enjoyment was always missing from HP movies before - everything was spectacular and over-the-top and energetic, but none of it looked like fun to be involved in, and certainly none of it was fun to watch. But with HP 3 the performers seem more realistic and relaxed while the plot (always a conspicuous absentee from the previous movies) is tightened-up and, to a certain extent, makes sense. In fact I am not ashamed to say that the last twenty minutes are actually pretty good.
"It's Quidditch tomorrow". Three words that strike fear in the hardest of hearts. Oh joy - Quidditch, with its pointless farting around, its endlessly-fake computerised imagery, its ability to bring HP films grinding to a halt for what seems like hours. Even here things have improved. This Quidditch match is short and even a little dramatic: Harry zooms up through rain and clouds to be met by the genuinely horrible Dementors. The special effects are a dramatic improvement, on the whole. The integration of computerised creatures with real ones is just about perfect. It's only when everything is computerised that things go awry - the colours are all wrong, the human figures look ludicrous, suspension of disbelief is impossible.
But we should be grateful that this is not a completely tedious mess. It's by no means perfect, but it's the first HP film to work as a film. The others may work as animated illustrations of the books (I haven't read them) but they don't work as films. This one does. That's progress. One final question: Have special effects been used on Daniel Radcliffe's face to make him look less like he's repressing a grin all the time? There is one close up where that definitely seems to be the case.