Bad news, guys: it sucks.

Rating: Null/10 (12 November 2001)

I will give the movie credit: they stuck extremely close to the book. Unfortunately, that's about as good as it gets. Daniel Radcliff as Harry has unseated Jake Lloyd in Episode 1 as Worst Performance by a Child Actor in a Major Motion Picture. Ron and Hermione aren't much better. I don't know who coached the kids, but they all seemed to take a page from the William Shatner textbook for acting. None of the three can get through a sentence without having a long, surprised, dramatic pause, accompanied by stuttering and repeating themselves. For example:
"You mean....I'm a.... I'm a wizard?"
"You mean....Does he....does he want you dead?"
"You mean....You mean you know about that?"
I'm not even exaggerating. They deliver every line like that for the entire two and a half hours. The entire cast essentially look the part, but the acting is flat and uninspired (with the exception, sometimes, of Alan Rickman). The cast is also badly directed. The timing is terrible, the shots are bland and stark. It looked like they put a four year old with a camcorder in charge of this film. The books were fresh and magical. The movie is cold and boring. Alan Rickman has his usual moments of brilliance, but his performance is marred by the fact that director Chris Columbus has him raising his eyebrows and looking sinister most of the time, and those shots don't come off well. You know you have problems when not even Alan Rickman can save your movie.
The score is distracting and way over the top, especially in the beginning.

The special effects are up and down. The sets and backgrounds look really cool, and the creatures sometimes look cool, but sometimes they're dreadful. The centaur in the Forbidden Forest looked as bad as the Rock at the end of The Mummy Returns. Voldemort's face was also pretty badly done. Hagrid sometimes looked cool, but something about his legs and the way he walked reminded me of Snuffelufagus from Sesame Street.
The worst was probably the chess scene toward the end. I guess Chris Columbus figured kids would be bored by watching a chess game, so instead (and I'm not kidding), he has about a minute of stone chess pieces exploding one after the other in slow motion, with an occasional shot of Ron, Harry, and Hermione attempting to act scared and determined at the same time. It doesn't help that the music at this point consists of very loud war drums. I thought for a minute or so that the projectionist had switched reels and we were actually watching Bravehart.
Harry's voice is different in every scene. I've read in the papers over here that Radcliff's voice cracked midway through filming, and some of his lines were dubbed by another kid. So you have Radcliff with a high voice, Radcliff with a lower voice, and Radcliff with a voice that's not Radcliff's.

The entire movie felt very rushed--understandably, since they tried to cram everything from the book into the movie, and the whole Harry Potter world is way too complex to do that easily. The movie was also, conversely, entirely too long. I'm currently dreading what's going to happen to the rest of the books if they try to make them, as they get progressively longer and more involved--especially the fourth one.
The kids will love it. Adults who know better and are also fans of the book will be disappointed.
After this disaster, I'm terrified of what's going to happen to Lord of the Rings.