To be perfectly honest with you, I've not got the energy or the time to write about this film in particular detail, such was my lack of energy upon leaving screen eight. So what I'm going to do is do a list of brief points, as if I were drunk in a pub at eleven o clock, somewhere near the Wandsworth Town rail station, probably The Alma, scrawling notes for this review on the back of a beer. So here we go. Let's get into character...
Okay. Sitting in a pub, sitting in a pub, Wandsworth Town, nice pub, full of rich middle class types, lots of tweed, lots of tracksuit bottoms with big letters on, gillets, lots of gillets, bottles of wine, bar snacks, olives, everyone has olives, I have a pint, I have a pint of beer, I paid a lot for it, I paid an extortionate amount for it, probably can't afford the train home now but hey, I have a pint, I've just been to the cinema, just been to see Harry Potter, just watched Potter, eaten lots of sugar, didn't drink anything, very dehydrated, full of sugar, teeth tingling, meant to go home and do proper review, can't be bothered, want beer, write it here, got pen, got beer mat, pen and paper, pen and mat anyway, right, ready, here we go:
1) If one is expecting the first part of the two-part final chapter in this monstrous franchise to stand alone as a film in it's own right and not just act as an extended prologue to the actual last film, then one would be sadly mistaken. HPDH-1 (as I'm now recalling it, and I don't care if it sounds the name of a printer/scanner) is hollow in humanity, lacking in character development of any real note, and flat as a proverbial witch's in its plotting; a succession of great escapes performed by the central trio of heroes that merely re-address the fact that they need to find a bunch of things and that there are people looking for them and it'll be hard. Not to sound like someone from The Hills but, well, like, DUH.
2) It is too long. Probably an hour, even an hour and a half too long in fact. If the second film is similarly over-extended, then there will be no arguing that splitting the films was not a creative decision but an act of greed.
3) The National Trust may well have slipped Warner a little something juicy over the past year or so, such is the feast of British countryside imagery on show in HPDH-1. Snowy hillsides, luscious rolling fields, mystical, magically woodland, it's all there, backdropping the tedious teenage love triangle that makes you pine for Twilight's melodramatic, pasty-faced, Dawson's Creek-meets-Buffy romping. It's not a great sign if, when the final credits roll, you can turn to your companion and say, with a straight face, that there were some lovely places to go camping in that film, weren't there...
4) With this new (is it new?) power called Disapparation, which is essentially a fancy pants way of saying teleportation, there is an undermining of the tension in many of the sequences in which Harry et al have to escape from the clutches of something or someone evil. Rather than fight their way out with wands and girly slaps and the like, our troubled heroes can simply hold onto each other's hands like their about to do the hokey cokey and - POOF - magically evaporate and reappear somewhere else, usually somewhere that somebody's been thinking of. With this power at their fingertips, it doesn't fill you with such dread when they find themselves trapped in a corner by some leather-wearing Dire Straits fan with a wooden stick. It goes: "Oh bloody norah, there's someone after us with a wand and a VFX snake, and there's no way out, no way at all, not even a magic toilet, I mean how the hell are we ever going to...oh, no, hang on, sorry, I just remembered, hold my hand, hold it, then I go like this..." and BAM, they're back in the woods, or on a cliff edge, or on Shaftesbury Avenue (suspiciously close to the windmill, the dirty blighters). Magic, yes, but a bit of a buzzkill, tension-wise.
5) Where once there was light, now there is darkness. Harry Potter of old was a bit of a laugh, remember? Little kids, all cute and cuddly and accidentally zapping each other in a bumbly British way, turning each other into goats and whatnot, fancying each other and having red hair and big round specs and losing control of their brooms so they flap around in the air like gloves in a hot tub. Remember that? The good old days? Fun, weren't they? Well, not anymore. Oh no. There's no laughs now, it's all got serious. It's all dark and green and grey and every time there's a chance for someone to say something funny, they cut away to another wide shot of some heather or something, or some ice, something cold and emotionless, because that's what's happened, it's all got dark and cold and scary, see?
6) Despite having a billboard cast of some of the finest British acting talent on offer, most rehearsal time seems to have been spent focusing Daniel Radcliffe's ability to look serious, despite wearing a frankly laughable pair of wire-framed spectacles. He pulls the same deadpan, pursed-lipped face when he's shouting as when he's thinking, and the only time in the film where I think I saw him smile was during a rather surreal dance sequence between Harry and Hermione in which it seems someone has pumped laughing gas into the room (maybe it was Danny DeVito as Penguin, sticking his umbrella underneath the edge of the tent and hissssssssssssss), because Harry starts twirling Hermione round and grinning like he's a plastic automaton in Mr Bubble's Bubbleworks (if you haven't been on it, you haven't lived, and get you to Chessington World Of Adventures).
7) The end is a bit of a damp squib, yes, as EVERYONE and their dog has pointed out, but that's what you get when you split a book in half. It's not the emphatic end to the show that we're used to from a Potter, but then the rest of the film isn't exactly Muse at Wembley, so what does it matter?
8) The end is nigh, both in Potterland and for the franchise, and it seems like its run its course. The relationships have become strained, and though the production quality is still as high as ever, especially in the visual effects and cinematography department, it seems the makers have lost sight of what attracted many cinemagoers who perhaps hadn't read the books (and that would include myself) to the films in the first place. Fun. Excitement. Adventure. These things have taken a back seat now to plot exposition and emotional angst, and I for one have slightly lost my taste for it.
9) Lastly, but not leastly. For all you yummy mummies out there. If you're thinking of taking your eight or nine year old child to see this, and that is your right with this being rated a 12A, can I just I just say this: DON'T. It's very scary, very scary indeed, for the younger audiences, or even the older audiences with a fear of slithery bastard snakes. It's better suited for older children, and even some of them might struggle.
That is all. I'm drunk now. I need to home go.
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