So I finally got around to watching the most recent Harry Potter film. As far as the previous films go, my favorite is still the third which was stylish, fun and inventive, but I thought the fifth film was also pretty outstanding, elevating one of my least favorite books in the series. 1 and 2 were middling kiddie fare, and 4 was solid, but not particularly distinguished as a film. And Half-Blood Prince strikes me as being at about four’s level. 

Visually, it’s pretty stunning. But the pacing is slow and the mood is mopey. The acting is all pretty strong, except maybe Rupert Grint who tends to play the comedy a little too broadly, and Bonnie Wright who plays Ginny either as Hermione, Jr. or a blank slate with no identifiable personality. Emma Watson, the standout from the core three in earlier films, is saddled with a subplot that sees her crying for most of the film’s running time and very little opportunity to be awesome. The kid playing Draco stepped up his game considerably, though, and the girl playing Luna livens up the whole show whenever she’s on-screen. All the teachers do outstanding work, particularly Jim Broadbent (who was the perfect Slughorn), Alan Rickman (kind of “no shit, sherlock,” but this is his best outing in this series), and Richard Harris, who still isn’t funny enough to be Dumbledore but owns this movie anyway. Unfortunately, Neville and Hagrid are basically cameos in this movie (and I’ve been really disappointed with how under-used Neville has been in all these movies, especially 5, because I think it’s gonna undermine his crowning moment of awesome in the finale.)

But there was little to no joy in this movie. Order of the Phoenix at least had “Fred and George quit school,” but the closest this movie came to fun was “Dumbledore cleans up Slughorn’s house” which is not really a fair trade. As I recall, the fun in this book mostly came from the liquid luck chapter, but that was a pretty sedate non-event in the movie. I also have to quibble with some of the music choices, which often seemed intrusive with their attempts to telegraph the mood of a given scene. This isn’t something that usually bothers me (hell, I love Lost and it did this all the time), but somehow it seemed to throw this movie out of balance, maybe because it would switch music within a scene if it wanted to change the mood, which is this close to playing the sound of a record scratch and having the main character (or a dog) do a double take. The main theme is still great though, and no denying it.

All in all, I give it a Good, But. I’m looking forward to the final two, anyhow. I’ll update with Caree’s thoughts and ratings when I talk about it with her tomorrow.