Something Less than Magical

Rating: Null/10 (20 November 2001)

Wizards have entered my brain and made me so confused. At least this is the impression I have from viewing the new Harry Potter film. Harry Potter has become an icon to the western world in recent years and with the skyrocketing sales of his last adventure, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, it seemed only fitting that a film should follow and thus, abracadabra, with but a budget in hand, it came to be.
The world seems to rave at its wonder, as Harry Potter, the abused orphaned boy, is taken from his horrid relatives to study at Hogwart's Academy of Wizards, a place where children of certain magical lines learn to perform magic that can never be performed in the outside world. Unfortunately, this film should have stayed in that mystical realm. Like The Grinch Who Stole Christmas and the recent remake of Planet of the Apes, this is another film with a story that rambles, filled with two-dimensional characters, that struggle their way through the special effects. Amazing, Steve Kloves, who had previously scripted Flash and Bone and The Fabulous Baker Boys, this time steps up to the plate and misses as does director Christopher Columbus, director of Home Alone, Home Alone 2, Mrs. Doubtfire and Bicentennial Man. Those were comedies. This was not. Grinchlike, the first flaws are apparently from the lack of propective.
Every angle in every scene is shot hideously close. Seldom is there anything but close-ups of everyone and everything. There is a sense of suffocation. But then, this film, like the Grinch, was made with the eventual dvd sales in mind, to be shown on a small screen. The opening shot starts out muddy, both in plot and in the graininess of the film, that supposedly describe how Harry Potter got the sorcerer's stone, a piece of glowing rock that has little to do with most of the story of Harry's birth to depth struggle as wizard boy of legendary fame, who as a small child was able to inexplicably defeat the greatest of all evils. The fact of the matter is that as a wizard, Harry is not all that wizardly. His greatest skill seems to be that he can ride a broom better than any of the other wiz kids, but in the spells department, he is just smoke and mirrors. Why the film was not just called Hogwart's is beyond me, for Harry Potter himself is of little significance to the film, other than the fact that one knows from the start that he has to be the one to save the day if only because his name is in the title. While none of the kids really had any prior acting experience, each handles their roles quite well, as do the rest of the cast. Film legend, Richard Harris had his career magically resurrected to star in this spell of tedium. The rest of the cast are generally well-suited to their roles. And that is where any chance the film had ends. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone might have been a decent film. The problem was that Kloves made the mistake of so many of his profession in trying to translate too much of the bound story and make it work on the screen. The result was a jumble of scenes, none of which depended on each other held a single storyline. I remember thinking to myself as I yawned my way through the more than two hours of this less than magical film, why could it not have been more like Young Sherlock Holmes?
No doubt I will be in the minority in my views of this big budgeted event. No doubt there are so many Harry Potter fans who look for anything Harry Potter, like the Star Wars diehards a generation ago, that I would be stoned if I spake these words in plain sight. But I went to the cinema looking for magic and watched only some slight of hand.