In many ways getting a Harry Potter gig is a poisoned Chalice. Do well and most of the fans will says that you did a good job putting someone else’s vision up on screen and so badly and you’ll suffer the slings and arrows of witless boobs outraged at the fact that you dared to drop one of Rowling’s army of minor characters. Indeed, to date the only director to have done well with a Potter film was Alfonso Cuaron whose Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban did wonders resurrecting the series from the hell of kids movies to which Chris Columbus’ early efforts had consigned it. However, as Mike Newell’s Harry Potter and The Goblet of Fire showed, it’s easy to over-egg the pudding and produce a film so weighed down by secondary plot lines that it loses all shape and timing. Interestingly though, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix shows that it’s equally easy to under egg the pudding and produce a film that feels under-written and predictable.
The film starts with Harry being informed that he has been expelled from Hogwart’s following his use of magic in front of normal humans. Thankfully a bunch of wizards turn up and whisk Harry off to a meeting of the secretive Order of the Phoenix (a sort of clearing house for sympathetic secondary characters designed to give them something to do when they’re not involved in the main plot) who reveal that Harry is at the centre of a political battle between Dumbledore and the current Minister for Magic who is denying the return of Voldemort. Cleared of the charges, Harry is then whisked off to Hogwarts where he finds a new professor pushing the Ministry line and refusing to teach actual practical magic. Soon Harry and friends find themselves having to sneak around and train themselves in the use of defensive magic, such is the paranoia of the Ministry and the vice-like grip of new professor Dolores Umbrage. Harry also learns that he has a mental link with Voldemort that grants him visions of the Dark Lord’s plans, tipping him off about an attempted robbery at the Ministry which Potter and pals rush off to thwart leading to a confrontation between first the Order of the Phoenix and Voldemort’s Deatheaters and then Voldemort and Dumbledore themselves.
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is clearly a film adaptation that has seen the bloated 800 page monster that is the original novel stripped down to the very barest of bones. Unfortunately, like a Size Zero model, the results are far from attractive. As with all Potter stories, Order of the Phoenix is locked into a school term-based three act structure the sees a distant threat looming larger and larger until an inevitable confrontation occurs. The other necessary fact about the Potter stories is that each story seems to involve the plotting of Voldemort and each story’s final confrontation is ultimately indecisive as the Noseless queen’s evil plans are foiled but he is left in complete freedom to come up with a fresh batch of schemes in time for the next book/film/videogame/mug/breast implants. Each Potter story slavishly follows this strict formula and Rowling lacks either the skill or the will to depart from it. Instead she relies largely upon the secondary plot lines to keep things fresh, whether it’s Harry’s love-life, Harry’s relationship with Dumbledore, Harry’s relationship with his friends or the general antics and monsters that go on in and around Hogwart’s classrooms.
Mike Newell’s adaptation of the Goblet of Fire was problematic as, despite the howls from Potter fans that he left out stuff like the Quidditch world cup, he spent much of the film chasing down a number of threads completely irrelevant to the main going’s on leading to huge amounts of time devoted to a completely pointless ball section that served only as an excuse to dress up the characters and allow them to do some cringe-worthy adolescent flirting. This result in a film that felt padded and overly long. However, Yates goes to the opposite extreme and produces a film that feels completely empty. Little time is spent on sub-plots such as the group coming together in training or Harry’s burgeoning relationship with Cho Chang (who has no more than 3 lines in the entire film and spends the entire two hours looking wistfully at Harry as though trying to recognise someone she might have once been at school with).
Indeed, despite featuring Harry Potter’s first kiss, the film is troubled by the fact that the actors in no way look like 16 year olds. They look like the fully grown adults that they are and as a result Harry and Cho’s chaste flirting feels ridiculous. At times they were so coy I couldn’t help but roll my eyes and hope they’d hop into bed and get it over with before remembering that they’re supposed to be 16. Indeed, the innocence of the Harry Potter books makes them feel incredibly old fashioned, as though from a by-gone era simply because they are not in step with contemporary depictions of teenagers such as those found in the misogynistic, dunder-headed, drugs and shagging-obsessed British TV series Skins. Of course, it’s quite possible that Rowling will reverse-course in the final book and feature a plot line about Ron Weasley stock-piling skunk in order to get the nameless, lineless Asian twins so catastrophically stoned and he manages to convince them to join him for a threesome.
The acting is, by and large, fairly solid. The triumvirate of Radcliffe, Watson and Grint are tolerable but definitely hemmed in by characters whose natures have long been fixed. So Harry is brave but troubled by responsibility, Hermione is uptight and earnest and Ron mopes about saying “Mate” a lot. Imelda Staunton is creepily officious and Gary Oldman is disturbingly supportive and touchy-feely. The problem is that none of them really have a huge amount to do given that the plot is entirely on rails from the second it begins. There’s no real character development, no depth, no interesting dialogue. Just two dimensional phantoms that float along keeping those formulae running.
Even the special effects feel weak as a young giant winds up looking like the dancing baby from Ally McBeal and the final magical confrontation feels over-edited and familiar. There is nothing here that we haven’t seen before and the huge scale of the Tri-Wizards competition from the previous film has nothing replacing it. Indeed, from the shorter running time to the scaled down plot and the more modest special effects, one can’t help but feel that a lot has been stripped out of this film with very little to show for it. It is understandable to cut needless things out in order to focus upon more important issues but Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix cuts things out and makes little of the increased space and time resulting in a film that feels terribly anaemic.
Five films in and still the Harry Potter series has yet to mature into anything but an over-grown kids movie. This is a real pity that does little to detract from the idea that ultimately few people will remember Harry Potter twenty years from now.
The Ally McBeal baby was intensely creepy.
Posted by: La Gringa | July 15, 2007 at 12:11 PM
huge amounts of time devoted to a completely pointless ball section that served only as an excuse to dress up the characters and allow them to do some cringe-worthy adolescent flirting.
That was the best bit of the film!
Posted by: Martin | July 17, 2007 at 01:28 PM
You be trippin', foo!
It was awful predictable tosh. It was obvious what was going to happen right from the start and Hermione dating the Serbian warcriminal... um... wizard was just creepy. Wasn't she supposed to be 13 compared to his 18?
The best bit was the tri-wizard competitions and I'd be willing to beat anyone who says differently with a pool queue.
Posted by: Jonathan McCalmont | July 17, 2007 at 01:41 PM