Faithful to the book, but missing something

Rating: 6/10 (30 July 2002)

For a book adaptation, "Harry Potter and the Socerer's/Philosopher's stone" is a fairly good effort. It remains as faithful to the book as possible, and leaves out very little in term of story. Unfortunately, it DOES leave out most of the humour of the book (which was to be expected, you simply can't put all those funny descriptions in the movie), but it sadly doesn't replace them with much else.
I agree with many people that the main problem with this movie is the direction. We all know and love the story, the acting is generally good, the special effects are adequate (some shots are really fake!) etc , but it all feels so very dry, the director didn't really add his own touch to the movie, like really good directors like Tim Burton or Steven Spielberg would do. Most of the famous actors are severely underused, too.

Most of this of course doesn't really matter as kids will still love this movie, but as it is, "Harry Potter" is more like a "painting by numbers"- exercise, while in the right hands it could have been a Picasso.