Review: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

The latest Harry Potter film, “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince,” absolutely baffles me. I don’t mean that the film is confusing—it is, a little, but that’s hardly the biggest problem. No, what I can’t understand is how a film can look this good, sound this good, have this many good actors, and yet somehow…not be much good at all. How can it be so much less than the sum of its parts?

Maybe the problem lies with the source material. “Half-Blood Prince,” after all, was certainly the weirdest of all the Potter books. Perhaps the slowest, as well. It was not much more than a seven-hundred page prologue to the seventh and final chapter in the series. If I recall, the slithery, deadly evil Lord Voldemort never even put in an appearance. Much of the book occurred in flashbacks, as Harry and Dumbledore tried to figure out what made Voldy tick. That was half the book; the other half was snogging, as hormones ran rampant in Hogwarts. Harry snogs Ginny, Ron snogs Lavender, and Hermione bitterly regrets snogging the oafish Cormac MacLaggen.

Not that I’m criticizing the book. Looking back, I might even choose it as my favorite. J.K. Rowling’s greatest strength as a writer came from her skill at writing relationships—Harry and Ron, Harry and Dumbledore, Harry and Voldemort, et cetera, et cetera. Yes, the magic was all very fun, but it could get quite goofy, even by fantasy standards. You can only read about Avada Kedavra and Expelliarmus and all the rest so many times before you start asking questions. Like, could you Accio the liver out of someone’s body? Wouldn’t that be a more effective way of killing than Avada Kedavra?

Relationships are key. But if there’s one thing the Harry Potter films don’t do well, it’s acting. Oops, sorry, I mean relationships. The acting is perfectly decent. All the usual British thespians are back—Michael Gambon as Dumbledore, Maggie Smith as McGonagall, Robbie Coltrane as Hagrid—and they all do an excellent job. Unfortunately, they’re all dancing around three big holes in the center of the film. Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, and Emma Watson look fantastic in long black robes and scarves, but I’ve yet to see them turn in a really good performance. I’d even be satisfied with a really decent one.

Some background is in order; God knows you’re not going to get it from the film. The Harry Potter books have always been harsh to newbies. When it comes to plot in the Potter movies, there are two kinds of people: those who know it by heart, and those who won’t have a clue what’s going on. The scenes rush by so quickly, with characters popping in and out at random, that a non-Potterphile will wind up completely baffled. At times, even I wished I had a copy of the book to flip through during the down time.

And there’s plenty of down time to be had. The beginning is literally magic, as a trio of flying Death Eaters wreak some otherworldly havoc on the oblivious Muggles of London. By the way, if you’ll permit a brief fanboy interruption: Flying? Didn’t that ability belong to only Voldemort and Snape? But that’s beside the point. After that opening joyride things get pretty slack. We get reacquainted with Harry while he’s sitting in a subway restaurant, flirting with the waitress. Harry’s only a few steps away from reaching non-wizard first base, but then Dumbledore has to show up and spoil all the fun. Rowling’s post-series revelation that Dumbledore was gay adds a new and rather interesting twist to this scene.

Dumbledore than spirits Harry away to meet Prof. Horace Slughorn (Jim Broadbent), a gouty, corpulent dandy obsessed with the finer things in life. Dumbledore hires Slughorn to teach at Hogwarts—so much for any pretense of interviewing other qualified candidates—so that Harry can wangle a long-repressed memory out of the portly professor’s brain. Apparently, Dumbly tells us, the memory is key to defeating Voldemort. And…that’s pretty much the movie, actually. Harry spends the next hour and a half wheedling with Slughorn, but Slughorn, to his credit, recognizes bad acting when he sees it.

Relationships! I get the feeling screenwriter Steve Kloves didn’t want to bother with all that stuff. In the book, we get a couple tangled love duets, with Harry lusting after Ginny, who’s dating somebody else, while Hermione longs for a couple minutes with Ron in the broom cupboard, if you know what I mean. Ron, in the book, gets caught up somewhere between Hermione and the amorous Lavender Brown. In the movie all this is replaced by a good deal of snogging. Ron snogs pretty much everything that moves, stopping just short of planting a kiss on Dumbledore’s whiskers.

Chemistry, however, is sadly lacking. Harry’s supposed to have a deep and heartfelt love for Ginny. After all, he marries her in the epilogue. But I’ve seen a third-grader with a test tube produce better chemistry than that which exists between the two. Ron? It doesn’t help that the poor guy has become 100% comic relief. He’s played solely for laughs, and I’ll give Rupert Grint credit: he’s got great comedic timing. Yet he’s less a human being and more of a manic yuk machine. And Hermione? I’m not even going to speculate. Emma Watson has always played her as completely imperturbable. Here, she’s more inscrutable than the stone turrets in the background.

It’s a flimsy plot—Slughorn and snogging—but it still takes up 95% of the movie’s time. Sure, there are some nods to the traditions of Potterphilia. We have a Quidditch game. We have a brief cameo by Hagrid. We have Neville Longbottom. We have shots of a bunch of students eating beneath the floating candles in the Great Hall. Incidentally, do the students eat anywhere other than the Great Hall? Do they ever take lunch in their rooms? It’s like Hogwarts is a prison and the students are GenPop.

Everything looks beautiful; the Potter films have never wanted for gorgeous backgrounds. The cinematographer….uh, whoever he was, he did a fine job with the camera. Every scene practically glows. The Quidditch match looks particularly pretty, with lots of nice twisting and turning acrobatic aerial shots. The flashbacks to young Voldemort occur in a hazy, dreamlike fog, adding an extra level of menace. And the magic still looks great. The flying Death Eaters are as magnificent and terrifying as anything out of a Peter Jackson film.

But it’s all dark, all dim, all gray, all leaden, sullen, static and despairing. Nothing moves. Nothing changes. The rich relationships of the book have fossilized into stiff declarations of teenage love. The whole background of an epic struggle between good and evil vanishes completely. I don’t know what it will take to make a good seventh film. The only thing I know is that six films in, the Potter films are still running a distant second to Lord of the Rings in the epic fantasy matchup. Will they ever catch up? Two more films to go. Let’s see what they’ve got.