Product: Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005)
Rating: 1.0
the worst so far
The movie is needlessly dark and violent. For instance, we didn't need to see Voldemort chop off Wormtail's hands. The filmmakers seemed to have forgotten these are children's books. In fact, the problem, bizarre as it sounds, is that the director didn't understand the source material. For him magic is whiz-bang carnival tricks. But in the books magic is an everyday thing for the characters, not a fourth of July celebration.Victor Krum looks like he's about 30 years old. The Durmstrang boys all look significantly older the Hogwarts boys. The Beauxbaton girls are dressed like Swedish flight attendants. Fleur is a seductress in the book but in the movie she's a plain-looking girl who only gets to speak once. Both of the schools enter to cheesy choreographed routines that look like they came from Cirque du Soleil. And was it really necessary to have a gratuitous shot of the girls' asses to let us know the boys were all worked up? It's more than a little skeezy objectivifying 14-year-old girls.The director is not at all comfortable with special effects. The underwater and maze scenes are just awful. You can see better watching any Saturday morning cartoon.Rita Skeeter added nothing to the story and only served to show up every so often to bring the plot to a screeching halt. Miranda Richardson vamps it up so much that her words take on an unnatural cadence. What results aren't even sentences. She totally, totally missed the mark. Ralph Fiennes as Voldemort and Brendan Gleeson as Mad Eye Moody are both excellent.And when did Ron become a hippie?