entertaining but ultimately nothing special

Rating: 4/10 (24 November 2001)

First off I haven't read any of the books. There's no real reason for this I simply haven't got round to them. which in the current climate must make me somewhat of a minority.
secondly one word to sum up this film: uneven
There are some thoroughly entertaining moments in this film particularly Robbie Coltraine's scenes as his comic timing is brilliant as ever. these moments are counter balanced by dire action sequences, particularly the quiditch game which is so slick and clinical that all traces of emotion are lost (think pod race in episode 1)
the three lead children where all excellent right up to the last twenty minutes when all of a sudden they reverted back to standard child actors and became stiff and wooden. In fact this entire section was badly scripted and directed which somewhat ruined what had gone before. until this point most of the dialogue between them was excellent.
In places however the film seemed little more than a montage of special effects which come so thick and fast that the subtlety of the "magic" scenery is lost.
I could be way off the mark here but from what I've heard about the books they are actually quite dark and Harry is quite insecure about his place in the school. I was expecting to see at least a little of this emotional turbulence but it appeared to have been glossed over with standard Hollywood values of friendship and loyalty. I thought the reason Harry had become so popular was that we finally had a child character who dealt with real problems. unfortunately the film doesn't deal with this at all.
All that criticism out the way the film is actually quite enjoyable over all and the running time didn't bother me at all so it must have kept me interested. It's just a shame thy couldn't have done more than present the same old 2 dimensional Hollywood characters.