Too literal, decidedly non-magical bore

Rating: 1/10 (15 December 2001)

About halfway through Harry Potter 1, I considered walking out. It's not that it was godawful, but having read the book, I knew how it all worked out-- and I had no confidence left that there would be anything the least bit interesting about how Rowling's story would be illustrated.
That's what it is; the book faithfully, and dully, illustrated, line by line. It's so faithful to the order of incidents (and the need to keep the story moving) that it has no time to give us any of the characterization that made us root for Harry; at best we get instantly recognizable movie stereotypes (Draco Malfoy has a Richie Rich 'do, therefore he must be from the same snotty rich kids' fraternity as Greg Marmalard). Seemingly ideal casting-- Alan Rickman as Snape, say-- is wasted when the characters turn out only to have half a dozen lines in the entire movie, most of them expository. Maggie Smith, Ian Hart, Richard Griffiths, Fiona Shaw, all wasted; the peerless John Cleese as Nearly Headless Nick has, as memory serves, all of two lines-- one to explain why he's nearly headless, and one to announce, in Boys' Own Weekly cliches, that the Quidditch Cup is sure going to be hotly contested this year. Maybe only Robbie Coltrane and John Hurt get enough dialogue to begin to sketch a character.

The other problem-- not unrelated, surely-- is that Chris Columbus is, for the millionth time, the wrong wrong wrong director for the job. He has no sense of magic, of mystery, of English eccentricity. Give him two wizards skulking about a suburban tract house, and he'll make them seem as ordinary as two retirees strolling and chatting about the weather. Give him an evil spirit sucking the blood of a dead unicorn and being interrupted by a centaur, and he makes it seem like two retirees strolling and chatting about the weather. Give him a chess game, and he makes it seem like World War III. Give him Gringott's bank, and he ignores the baroque set that's been built and can't wait to show us a big pile of gold, which is surely a bit revealing. This isn't as awful a blockbuster as, say, Tomb Raider, but it comes from the same land of impoverished imagination camouflaged with booming, expensive yet somehow cheap-looking special effects.