How to take advantage of your children's naivety for the sake of cold cash...

Rating: 3/10 (22 November 2001)

I have, in all my life as a lover of both literature and the cinema, hardly ever come upon a piece of work more unimaginative, more ugly, more uninteresting, more lacking in suspense, more lacking in charm, more greedy, more incoherent... Okay, okay. I'll stop with the superlative negatives. Surely there have been worse, and, yes, off the top of my head, I can think of many that are worse. However, for a book that over 125 million people have read, and for a movie that cemented the record for the biggest opening weekend in history, and also for a book that has had not only kids but critics singing its praises, and also for a movie which one particularly fat-headed critic called the Wizard of Oz of its generation, I am more than severely disappointed. I know that, had it not been so overhyped, it would have been just as bad. Now, however, my anger for it is completely hardened and it's going to be a passionate battle for me for years to come.
I go into an in depth criticism, but it would be impossible for me to keep to 1000 words. There is hardly a piece of it that I liked. As a film, it was poorly edited, poorly acted (by most), poorly filmed. The only really memorable scene is the troll in the bathroom, although the payoff to it makes no sense whatsoever. The Quidditch game, which has been hyped to all heaven, is completely boring and poorly created. It looks like the FX guys created it with photoshop. When the chess game looked like it was about to be the most exciting sequence in the film, Christopher Columbus, who, I must say, lives up to his reputation completely, begins to edit furiously. I heard afterwards that this was done to avoid a PG-13. My immediate thought is that the filmmakers didn't trust their young audience to enjoy watching a chess game, no matter how exciting it might have been. I'm still not sure which story to buy.
But the person I really want to tear into is J.K. Rowling. What a hack. Never has the word "hack" been more fitting. A former waitress, her idea of imagination is to call things by weird names. Only in the mind of a psychopath (or idiot) could the name Draco Malfoy or a Cerberus clone named Fluffy be considered clever. Writing children's literature is not difficult, but this is simply awful. She's clearly ripping off Raoul Dahl like there's no tomorrow, especially in the exposition. The game of Quidditch, which seems to be a drawing point of some sort, is absolutely nonsensical. As a preteen, I invented much more interesting games with much less interesting playing pieces. Quidditch is a game where people score ten points at a time, unless someone catches a special type of ball, which ends the game immediately. So theoretically, the game could end in thirty seconds. And all the other forms of scoring matter not at all. And let's talk about the surprise climax. Really, anyone could have been standing in front of that mirror at the end. It is tremendously unclever. And the penultimate sequence, where the crown is awarded to the best dorm, is anticlimactic and just rude to the children of Slytherin, We only hate one of them, so why should we be happy that the award at first goes to them, and then is cruelly snatched away. And what about Hogwart, anyways? If you're not supposed to use magic when you're away from Hogwart, why the heck would you want to be a wizard anyways?
Friends, you're well on the path to making your children drooling morons. If they want a great series of books about sorcery and magic creatures, make them read the Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis. This is the most soulless garbage imaginable. And I thought Shrek had taken that title. 3/10