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Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Crowning Potter’s ‘Prince’ among Harry’s best
About half a year ago, one couldn’t find much good press regarding Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.
First Warner Bros. had the GALL to delay the film. Why, there HAD to be something wrong with the movie, people groused. Rumors flew that the movie had tested poorly and that director David Yates and company had botched the book’s famously heart-rending climax.
As of July 2009, those complaints are officially bollocks.
Not only is Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince a considerable improvement over the last film, Order of the Phoenix, it’s the second best film of the series, behind only Alfonso Cuaron’s Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.
While I enjoyed Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, that film felt like the first time the series had taken a major step backwards. While its best moments worked very well, overall it felt too compressed, too rushed. One of this blog’s readers put it very well when she said the filmmakers made a major mistake turning the longest book into the shortest film.
This time, however, those shortcomings have mostly vanished. Regular screenwriter Steve Kloves, who sat out Phoenix, has returned, and so has the confidence in the storytelling. The direction, too, is much bolder and more assured, with Yates turning in some of the most visually striking set pieces in the entire series.
By now it seems almost a habit to say the series is growing increasingly darker and more foreboding, but it’s especially true in Half-Blood Prince, the somewhat questionable PG-rating notwithstanding.
The armies of the villainous Voldemort are gathering strength, even to the point of invading our Muggle world. To stop the dark lord, Harry and his allies must discover secrets of Voldemort’s past - secrets so deeply buried that uncovering them portends dire consequences.
One of the major drawbacks of Order of the Phoenix was that it felt too episodic, rushing through sequence after sequence, thereby glossing over what really makes this series work - not all that magic razzmatazz, but the interaction between Harry and his closest confidantes, Ron and Hermione. That chemistry is back in full force this time, with each actor playing to their strengths, and sometimes revealing new ones.
Daniel Radcliffe grows ever more confident in the title role. No longer playing the straight man to all the wild things around him, the actor legitimately commands the screen. Rupert Grint, who has always worked best as the comic relief, does some of his funniest work here, and Emma Watson, my favorite from the beginning, shows increasingly impressive emotional range, particularly when Hermione comes to grips with the fact that she just might be in love with Ron.
Of the new faces in the cast, Jim Broadbent is, unsurprisingly, a standout. He’s ideally cast as the somewhat befuddled but ultimately steadfast Professor Slughorn, who holds the most crucial key to Voldemort’s past - one he does not give up so easily.
Just as Radcliffe has grown into his role well, so has Yates. Deftly balancing the comedy and the drama of the story, he very cleverly segues between the scenes, making Half-Blood Prince flow much easier than its predecessor. The director’s visual command is impressive too, thanks in no small part to the imaginative cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel (Amelie, Across the Universe). They create some surreal visions and tense action scenes that are peaks for this series.
As for that famously emotional climax, I don’t want to give too much away, but I will say it is true to the spirit of the book, even if it is staged rather differently. The audible sniffles I heard from the crowd told me the ending did its job. It’s a powerful setup for the final chapter, Harry Potter and Deathly Hallows, which has been split into two films, again directed by Yates.
Any complaints I have are barely worth mentioning. The second half has a few minor lulls that keep this film from matching my favorite, Azkaban, but I’m not going to quibble when a film delivers as well as this one does. From here on out, the press on Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince ought to be nothing but good.
GRADE: A
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