Leonid Mamchenkov

The other day I had no choice but accompany my beloved wife to the cinema.  Harry Potter was in town again.  I myself am not a big fan at all.  I think it had great potential and the first movie absolutely awesome from pretty much every perspective, but then it went south.  It turned into a story of growing up characters, which is rarely a good thing.  It became dark and scary.  And complicated.  And now it’s all over the place.

Seriously, I don’t know anymore who is the intended audience for these movies.  It’s definitely not kids, due to all the darkness, politics, and complexity of the story.  And I’m not so sure about adults, because it’s getting increasingly stupid.  Maybe there is something for teenagers, but I can’t see that.  And those teenagers who were present in the cinema seemed to be missing the point also.

Anyhow, to set the record straight, I haven’t read any of the Harry Potter books.  And I started skipping the movies.  I think I missed the previous episode, but saw the one before that. “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1” didn’t make any sense to me and on top of that it was as boring as they come.

It started off with too many characters who I didn’t remember and had no idea of who they were.  There was some action that I didn’t see any reasons for.  And then the movie simply died.  It turned into the least favorites of Lord of the Rings for me.  Where the hobbit people were just walking and walking and walking.  It was exactly the same here.  Except that hobbits had a purpose.  And here, even if there was one, it was not obvious.

With nothing to engage my attention, I started looking closer at the technical side of the movie.  And not surprisingly it sucked too.  OK, I can understand that Harry and friends aren’t innocent children anymore and its hard to hide.  But I think that excessive face and chest hair are the mistakes of the make-up team.  Camera work was horrible.  By now we are all well familiar with handheld cameras and the effect that give the movie.  Many of us in the audience also know where it makes to use the effect and where it doesn’t.  And in Harry Potter it mostly doesn’t.  Yet, there are plenty of sequences where it was used.  The music – one of my favorite parts about Harry Potter movies, was practically non-existing also.  In several scenes, where I was trying to figure out what was going on and what was the mood of the setting, I caught myself thinking that I’d appreciate the music instead of the silence.  Are they in trouble?  Are they scared? Are they bored or just waiting for someone?  A tiny bit of background music could help the audience answer such questions.  But not in this installment.

Overall, the movie was too long for what it had to show.  Too boring.  Not engaging at all.  And technical cheap and poor.  It felt like one of those things you’d get from a pirated copy, stolen from the director’s table before the work is finished.  And yet it was an official theatrical release.  Bad.  Very bad.  1 out of 10.