Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 (David Yates, 2011)

[I guess I should issue a spoiler warning for this review, but honestly, if you've neither read the book nor seen the movie yet are still reading reviews hoping not to be spoiled, what the hell is wrong with you?]

Viewed as a referendum on the Harry Potter film franchise (to say nothing of my childhood), Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2 is bound to fail. With precious few exceptions, this series has favored exposition over organic growth, deflated climaxes and spotty special effects, and at times this franchise has been so lifeless that Britain's talent pool has been drained to give these films any weight at all. Numerous critics and admirers have remarked upon the franchise's consistency given the number of editors and directors that have taken on the material, but I think that is something of a detriment. Regardless of who's made these films, the studio has made sure that nothing, not even Alfonso Cuaron's "none more black" mise-en-scène, has rocked the boat. Hiring David Yates, a workman whose primary skill has been putting exposed film into cans, seemed the final push to make these movies as crowd-pleasingly safe as possible.

And yet, Deathly Hallows Part 2, like its predecessor, shows Yates not overcoming his flaws but offsetting them with narrow but powerful strengths. The final installment in this film franchise suffers the same overarching, aforementioned issues that plague all these films, and it also suffers from the convolution, calculated audience appeasement and rush-job pacing of Rowling's written conclusion. Yet for once, I can confidently say that few, if any, of the film's major flaws can truly be traced back to Yates, while a great deal of its moments of pure atmosphere and character are specifically the result of his hand.

Die Hard

Die Hard is the Rio Bravo of the 1980s, a reflection of both its taut structure and execution as well as the sorry intellectual backslide in the three decades between the two films. It's big and loud and exceptionally stupid, which is precisely what it's striving to be. In fact, the writers sabotage the film's potential political subtext almost instantly, revealing the terrorists who seize the gaudy, modern Nakatomi Plaza spouting radical rhetoric to be nothing more than a pose for a group of avaricious thieves.

The film does, however, put forward a gentle class subtext: its hero, John McClane (Bruce Willis), announces his working class roots when he steps off a plane -- an experience in and of itself he clearly knows little of -- and finds a limo waiting to take him to his wife, manned by a young, hip black kid too young and too laid-back for his job. The boy, Argyle, admits he's never driven a limo before, and McClane helpfully responds, "That's OK, I've never ridden in one." He sits in the front passenger seat and chats with Argyle, who chats and plays rap tapes that convey how clueless the two of them are with these luxurious new digs. McClane, a New York cop, didn't follow his wife to her lucrative new job in Los Angeles, and Argyle is savvy enough with his own kind to figure out that McClane hoped the offer would fall through and she might return to New York (the inference being his frustration at not being the primary breadwinner).

Director John McTiernan does not let us ponder these questions for long, however. He spends less than 20 minutes establishing John, his wife Holly (who has reverted to using her maiden name), the conflict between the two and the potential romantic and class rival of Harry Ellis (Hart Bochner). At around the 17-minute mark, McTiernan locks the doors, both on the towering business building and on the metaphorical cinema doors the audience might have walked out of, and proceeds to unleash hell. Narrative, character, subtext (ha) all take a backseat to the pure rush of the action.

Die Hard has everything: explosions, gunfights, no-nonsense black partners to offset the rash, loose-cannon white cop, a vault heist and a British actor playing a German villain. Most importantly, it gives audiences an action hero with whom they'd like to have a beer. John McClane sports a wife beater, a bad haircut and, due to the shock of the robbers' break-in, no shoes. Were we not already informed that he was a police officer, we might assume he was on his way to L.A. to appear on some tawdry daytime television show that airs the results of paternity tests to trash of all colors and creeds. But McClane is quick, with a dry wit and a certain composure under pressure that could never be called "grace" but is more likely to keep him alive. Unlike the invincible Nietzschian superheroes played by Schwarzenegger and Stallone, Willis' McClane looks like he takes every hit we see him receive: by the end of the film, he's such a bloody, shrapnel-riddled mess he inspires more fear through his ability to somehow stay on his feet as those other '80s protagonists did by emerging unscathed.

Those of my generation, those who grew up with the bald, flexing Willis, may not appreciate how funny Bruce Willis can be if given the right material -- his recent, dead-eyed plodding through Cop Out clearly does not represent the right material. He hit fame with Moonlighting, and he brings his deadpan delivery to this role. Try not to laugh when McClane narrowly escapes from heavy machine gun fire and nearly falls down an abysmal elevator shaft before finally pulling himself into a ventilation shaft, sarcastically sighing, "Come to the coast! We'll get together, have a few laughs!" That sense of fatalism and "it figures" attitude gives McClane an edge and a humanity where future Bruce Willis action protagonists (including the sequel iterations of McClane) give us only supermen.

Hell, Die Hard bursts at the seams with amusing gags and lines, most of them split between Willis' Joe Six-Pack sarcasm and Alan Rickman's unique approach to line delivery. He lets words ooze from his lips reluctantly, as if simultaneously sneering at the lines he's deigned to speak and unwilling to part with them. As British comedian John Sessions noted in his stellar impersonation of Rickman, the actor's lower lip almost never moves. His Hans Gruber provides a nice foil for McClane as the erudite, well-dressed vision of pure greed. He and his cohorts are (mostly) German, yes, but these cats are less Baader-Meinhof than Karl Lagerfeld. He breaks into an office building that inexplicably holds nearly a billion dollars in bearer bonds and assorted trinkets -- including a suit of samurai armor, presumably because Japanese businessmen always have one on hand, right? -- in order to increase his own profits: in this case, the rich eat themselves. On the ground outside the plaza, McClane finds a kindred spirit in Sgt. Al Powell (Reginald VelJohnson), the cop who investigates the place on a call from the trapped NY officer. They both deal with the staggering incompetence of both the head of the LAPD (played magnificently by Paul Gleason) and the FBI agents (both named Johnson; "No relation," says one, ignoring the hint of their different skin colors) sent to relieve Chief Robinson. If Die Hard has a political message to impart, it's that those with the authority don't know jack about shit, and they will always hamper the efforts of the subordinates who actually do know how to get things done.

But that is all secondary to the insurmountable pull of both McClane and the ingenious staging of Nakatomi Plaza. Like Rio Bravo and Precinct 13, the tower is at once spacious and claustrophobic, with the dimensions of the building further shrunk by the clever restriction of action to the top floors. The action rarely returns to the same room, though some look alike, yet the open, mostly unfinished rooms offer nowhere to run and only fleeting places in which to hide. The action constricts further as McClane escapes into the "guts" of the building, surrounded by pipes and shafts as he shoots at other men with guns (just in case the gender tension at the start of the film wasn't obvious enough). Somehow, this large/small building can withstand the sort of pressure normally spread out over entire cities, as the series of explosions that rock Nakatomi Plaza can rival the effects of the most epic war movies. If you want to see "stuff blowed up real good," as Roger Ebert always puts it, you'll find no better venue than Die Hard.

In fact, I find myself groaning now when I see the fleeting attempts to give this story any weight. The rapport between McClane and Powell is surprisingly heartfelt, all the more impressive given their constant physical separation. But the insertion of a scene meant to openly and unmistakably unite them, a dull, plodding cliché concerning Powell's accidental shooting of a minor, saps some of the effortless chemistry Willis and VelJohnson share. Holly becomes something of a Hawksian female as the film progresses, proving to be as sharp as her husband and as capable of facing down Hans, but she's still underutilized and exists mainly to affirm masculinity in the final moments through her reconciliation with her husband. But the film's gender and social politics are warped, and I would venture to say that I'm drawing them through my own reaching, not through any intended themes set by the writers or McTiernan. Its swipes at incompetent authority figures and the egotistical drive of the press are funny but simplified and lazy; it accepts those in charge and those tasked with delivering information as the sinister enemies of the Common Man, which predicts the current climate of social hysteria among some circles in Real America more than it reflects Reagan's era.

In another film these would be critical flaws, but Die Hard attains a certain timelessness precisely through its desperate attempt to play into no social message other than the glorification of the one man army, and even that is subverted through the amount of abuse piled on its hero. Its attention lies squarely on the framing and pacing of the action, which doesn't so much slow burn as burst into a cataclysm like napalm and rage until there is no more forest left to burn. The film embodies the sort of stupidity that only someone very clever could conceive, and when it ends with bearer bonds drifting down like snow as Vaughn Monroe sings "Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!" it's hard to call Die Hard anything but the best action film ever made.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

After running through my marathon viewing of the previous five installments of the Harry Potter franchise in the last two days, I've come to a simple realization: as a whole, the series is frustratingly average. For a series set in a magical alternate world tucked away from our weary doldrums, it never conveys any sense of the wonder of J.K. Rowling's mad creation. Even as the series grew darker with each sequel, half the fun of reading them was exploring new places and oddball characters, which gave them an unassailable joyousness no matter how bleak the outcome looked for our heroes.

Not that Harry is feeling particularly cheery at the start of Half-Blood Prince. Now exonerated in the court of public opinion following proof of Voldemort's return, Harry must endure press junkets mere minutes after watching his godfather Sirius die. This devastating moment rarely has any impact on the story at all, however, perhaps because the last film failed to wring much emotion out of it. Dumbledore whisks him away, and soon he plucks Harry from his summer break begin the hunt for their nemesis.

Michael Gambon has been a treat ever since he took over for the late, great Richard Harris in the third film, but he brings his A-game this time, mixing regret, quiet strength and subtle humor effortlessly. He holds the entire film together as he takes Harry on strolls through a magical Memory Lane to trace Voldemort's history.

The first act of the film is perhaps the best stretch of the film series: it captures the darkness of the novel, and Yates' direction is sturdy and evocative. Harry's trips with Dumbledore and the Pensieve scene involving a young Tom Riddle (Hero Fiennes-Tiffin, nephew of Ralph Fiennes, Voldemort himself) are deeply and wonderfully unsettling, and I caught myself tensing up at times. A note, though: when Death Eaters fly through London and destroy a crowded Muggle bridge, the effect is somewhat spoiled when the camera zooms out from people frantically running to see the bridge twisting...without a soul standing on it. That's pretty basic animation, guys.

Then we start following our beloved trio through the school year, and Half-Blood Prince loses its way. Yates and writer Steve Kloves suddenly drop the dark air of the first act in favor of a protracted inspection of the romantic woes of all three. Ron and Hermione's attempts to woo the other only drive them further apart, while Harry apparently has to queue up for a crack at Ron's little sis Ginny (Bonnie Wright). These slightly comical interactions throw off the pacing and greatly distract from the mission at hand. I've read a number of reviews claiming that this movie works because it shows the characters maturing like normal teenagers despite the predicament surrounding them, but Kloves only explores this aging through unfunny comic relief.

There is one moment, when Hermione sits dejected as Ron snogs a clingy devotee and asks how Harry feels when he sees other boys with Ginny. As Ron walks past with his facesucking buddy in tow, Harry nearly whispers, "It feels like that." That one line is achingly beautiful, and more lines like that would have made the distraction from the Voldemort story because it genuinely would have fleshed these characters out. But no, that line is sadly just a fluke. Why Yates decided to stick with these subplots at the expense of the excellent Voldemort history lesson is beyond me.

Furthermore, the final battle in Hogwarts has been drastically altered and excised, and Yates took the emotional weight of the scene along with it. When the identity of the Half-Blood Prince is revealed, it's already been softened by a scene cut and pasted from the seventh book that openly hints at the true nature behind the final tragedy. And for all the planning the Death Eaters put into breaking into Hogwarts, they seem to stroll out as quickly as they enter, leaving only a single vandalized room in their wake. Imagine if Robert De Niro's character spent all of Heat planning, only to walk into the bank at the end and make a deposit.

On the positive side, the acting is up to the usual standards. Radcliffe may never be convincing as a reluctant, angsty leader (or even one of the three), and Watson still over-pronounces each line, but the others are great. Poor Rupert Grint has always made the best of a bad situation with the under-written Ron -- heck, when the fame-whore Slughorn (Jim Broadbent) never remembers his name, I felt he did so not because the Weasleys are ordinary wizards but because even I know nothing about him at this point of the film franchise -- but he gets some big laughs with his dopey grin and his constant bemusement. Both Fiennes-Tiffin and Frank Dillane (who plays the teen Riddle) are pitch-perfect in their roles, and Dillane in particular makes me wish far more of the film had been devoted to him working his icy charm on unsuspecting adults.

However, it's Tom Felton, the best of the child actors since the first film, who steals the show as the hardened yet tortured Draco. He's always had that haughty sneer down pat, but we see another side of him in this film, and he outperforms even the adults. If only Yates had stopped replaying the scene of him ripping the curtain off of a magic cabinet over and over and used that time to let Felton do something else, because I believed every choice Draco made in this movie, even more so than I did in he books.

All in all, Half-Blood Prince, like all of its predecessors save Prisoner of Azkaban, has excellent moments but fails to add up into a cohesive whole. Its omissions and alterations result in an enjoyable movie, but one that builds to a climax that never comes. As with "Order of the Phoenix," it takes an emotionally charged ending and mishandles it to the point of tedium. And for the love of God, will they give Alan Rickman something to do before this series ends?

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

All right, then. Now that I've gotten all the background for my feelings on the Harry Potter franchise out in my previous review -- hey, it's almost like an allegory for the film itself! -- I can now fully concentrate on the film at hand, hopefully wasting less of your time with fewer words. Let's see how long I can go until I shatter that promise, shall we?

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone nearly bored me to tears; its endless exposition and world building left it without an emotional core, thanks in no small part to the amateurish acting of it three leads (who, to be completely fair, were indeed amateurs). Having not watched either it or this second installment since before the fourth film hit theaters, I found myself dreading the prospect of revisiting the other Columbus adaptation. After all, the first film was downright cloying in its faithfulness, and I didn't remember this deviating too much, either. So, I at last resigned myself to inevitable defeat, comforted slightly by the realization that soon I could move on to the third and fourth installments.

Happily, the film was a noticeable improvement all around. The Chamber of Secrets, working in the same world established in the first novel, freed Rowling to actually explore her characters a bit and, alongside the rambling Order of the Phoenix, contains some of the least plot of the series. Ergo, when Chris Columbus and Steve Kloves treat this book with the same adoring care they did the first, they can, in theory, spend more time with the characters.

Amazingly, Chamber of Secrets is a good 10 minutes longer than the previous movie, though its pace has noticeably quickened. Harry languishes in the Dursleys' home for the summer, kept away from his new friends, who curiously don't even send him any post. One night he's visited by a self-tormenting house-elf named Dobby who plays like a poor man's Gollum (basically, he's all Sméagol, yet he stil fights wth himself). Dobby begs this kind and powerful boy not to return to Hogwarts, lest unspeakable danger befall him. To ensure this, he causes a ruckus which the Dursleys blame on the lad. The Weasleys break him out, though, and soon Ron and Harry are off for another year of adventure.

Newcomers in the film include Jason Isaacs as a note-perfect Lucius Malfoy, who out-sneers even Tom Felton's Draco when he condescends to Harry and the entire Weasley clan. But it's Kenneth Branagh's Gilderoy Lockhart who steals the show. The foppish oaf with a winning smile (literally) takes up the vacant position for Defense Against the Dark Arts, but he quickly reveals himself to be nothing more than a charlatan and a buffoon. Such a role easily calls for some scenery chewing, but Branagh is just restrained enough to make Lockhart work as both comic relief and infuriating sub-villain.

But the main enemy this time is not the Dark Arts teacher but an unknown assailant attacking students with Muggle blood. A message is written in blood: "The Chamber of Secrets has been opened. Enemies of the Heir, beware." Soon, Harry's ability to speak with snakes is revealed, and he becomes the prime suspect. At some point, he stumbles upon a magic diary that can converse with him and even show him memories from the last time that the Chamber was opened.

These events start the ball rolling toward the darker tone of later installments in the series, but Columbus still attempts to create an air of whimsy about the picture, something he couldn't even do when the tone of the novel fit the approach. I mean, Harry and co. have to interview the ghost of a girl who was killed in the previous attack spree, yet that never feels as disturbing as it really is.

When Harry at last descends into the Chamber, though, things pick up considerably. The animation of the basilisk looks nice, but it never blends into the backgrounds convincingly, and Columbus' stabs at action shots lapse into absurdity -- a POV shot of the snake lunging for Harry is particularly laughable. I also picked up on one line, when Tom Riddle, the man in the diary and the basilisk's master, shouts: "The basilisk may be blinded, but it can still hear you!" A problem: snakes don't have ears. Now, it can pick up vibrations, sure, but even a giant snake that can kill with a stare is sill a snake.

On the plus side, the acting gets a bit of a boost this time around. Rickman still has little to do (indeed he is tragically under-used throughout the series) and Harris, though authoritative, fails to capture either Dumbledore's loopy essence or his hardened core. He instead seems more like an English Mr. Miyagi, offering faintly witty nuggets of advice and encouragement. Radcliffe, however, delivers his lines with more conviction, and Grint works as great comic relief if not a strong lead in his own right. Watson too has improved her approach, still capturing Hermione's nerdiness but backing off the more annoying deliveries. Even as new cast members such as Branagh and Isaacs steal their scenes, these kids can finally hold their own, though it helps that the rest of the vets are still either phoning it in or limited by the script.

The entire film's quality in relation to the previous film can be summed up in its score: John Williams' soundtrack for the first film was a garish, clanking affair that fully displayed the composer's worst traits -- overly boisterous blasts of brass and strings that signal triumph even before the battle's been won. And the Diagon Alley music sounded like a lame carnival. Here, he's more subdued, but barely. He still chucks himself in the middle of scenes and robs them of their power, but just not quite as often. That's Chamber of Secrets in a nutshell: still a weak, too-literal movie, but the signs of a positive growth are certainly exhibited.

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

With the release of the sixth Harry Potter installment upon us, I decided to revisit the other five films for the first time in ages, to chart the series's progression on celluloid but also because nostalgia is a dangerous, dangerous thing and I seek to undermine it where possible. Then again, I don't recall ever going crazy for any of the actual films; it was the book series that, like countless others of my generation, gripped me. It didn't make me want to read -- I was always an avid reader, though I've shamefully fallen off the wagon since leaving for college -- but the series always kept me entertained.

Until I tried to re-read them, that is. About two years ago, before the final book hit shelves, I had a marathon reading session over a few weeks, most of which felt like arduous labor the writing had so soured on me. I actually gave up on the first two books altogether because I found their styles to be so simplistic, while the fifth was so cumbersome and tangential I wondered if they just published her first draft by mistake. But films tend to cut stories down to their barest essences, and they allow the director and adapting writers to explore their own themes. "So why not give 'em a go?" I wondered.

Sometimes I wish I didn't just go with every thought that pops into my head. As with the first book, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone -- I will never understand why American publishers changed the title from the original Philosopher's -- churns out all the mythology-establishing exposition needed to launch a franchise, and it gets so bogged down in telling us about this incredible alternate world that it never bothers to take advantage of the properties of film and actually show us.

Oh, there is Computer-Generated Imagery aplenty, but too often characters describe Hogwarts' splendor as they quickly whisk through the scene, as if to outrun budget limitations. Then again, $125 million should have gone a long way since epic action pieces don't really enter the series until the fourth book, so they really could have fleshed things out a bit if only they just cut the sodding thing down some.

Oh my God, now I know why I liked this as a 12-year-old back in November 2001: they didn't leave out a goddamn scene. There's a false perception among the fans of any piece of literature on its way to the big screen that the movie's quality is directly proportionate to how rigidly it follows every scene, every line even, of the book. This is, of course, utter hogwash: where some films work wondrously for adhering to the author's vision (No Country for Old Men, which is almost certain to go down as the best film of the decade), many of the best deviate notably from the narrative and even themes of the source to explore new territory (The Shining, Ran). Director Chris Columbus and screenwriter Steve Kloves are too afraid of angering children to take any chances.

I mean, I'm so confident that people are aware enough of the phenomenon that was Harry Potter that I haven't even gotten down to the plot yet; do you really need me to? Harry (Daniel Radcliffe), an orphaned lad sent to live with his aunt and uncle after surviving an attack by the dreaded Lord Voldemort, is abused and mistreated by his guardians. On his 11th birthday, a giant, Hagrid (Robbie Coltrane) finds him and reveals that Harry is a wizard and shall attend Hogwarts, the finest magical institution in the world. Soon, we discover that Harry is the biggest celebrity in the magic world, simply for surviving Voldemort's attack.

On the way to his new school and life, he befriends Ron Weasley (Rupert Grint), the second youngest member of a seemingly endless family, and Hermione Granger (Emma Watson), a book-smart Muggle-born who knows more about magic in her first year than is mentally possible. None of these kids really has a grasp on the characters yet, what with Radcliffe's inability to convey any sense of rage, or pain or anything other than a dopey grin, really. And that's nothing compared to Watson delivering every line like she just got done running three miles, or her distracting emphasis on any word starting with an 'h.' They lack charisma at this juncture, which is an unfair thing to criticize in a child, but they're meant to carry the film.

To take the weight off of them, Columbus assembled a cast comprising some of the finest British actors in the biz, from Maggie Smith (Gryffindor professor McGonagall) to the aforementioned Coltrane to Richard Harris (Albus Dumbledore). Such a team could carry just about any movie, but Columbus never features any of them prominently enough to let them pick up the slack. Alan Rickman is a good choice for the venomous Severus Snape, but it will be a few films before he pours into the role with the oily bitterness it requires. Ian Hart's role as villain Professor Quirrell is, by nature of the novel, so underwritten that he cannot make an impression, and the final reveal of his "better half" is undone by some dodgy CG.

That weak animation also hurts some of the better sequences of the film, chiefly the Quidditch match. Quidditch rapidly became such an annoying distraction in the books that Rowling relegated it to the background starting with the fourth book, but it once was a fun break from stories that were light enough to support the aside. Here, it's the most exhilarating moment of the film, which reflects on the tepid direction of the final gauntlet of challenges protecting the Philosopher's Stone and Columbus' inability to fill them with any sense of tension or even excitement. So, it's up to the Quidditch game, but the animation is choppy and you can practically see the green screen behind the actors on their broomsticks. Still, it carries a bit of dramatic heft to it, and I actually found myself caring about the outcome even though a) I knew what would happen and b) I don't even care about real sports.

Elsewhere, though, the script is so concerned with just throwing every single narrative event of the novel on the screen, only to leave out what minimal character growth existed. I understand that the novel was all about setting up the sandbox in which these characters played, but as that's the case, the film hardly needs to be 2-1/2 hours long. It almost feels like five episodes of the first season of Harry Potter: The Series than a proper film, making the whole thing more of a chore than an escapist fantasy.

That dogmatic adherence to Rowling's writing means that the same contrivances of the book now appear on-screen: Harry, who must wear glasses because of weak eyesight, becomes "the youngest player in a century," and as the Seeker no less. How can someone who needs corrective lenses somehow see a tiny, darting ball that becomes entirely invisible if it moves more than six feet away from your face? For that matter, is there not a spell that has a similar effect to eye surgery? A number of older wizards wear spectacles as well; this is a bigger logic gap than Captain Picard's baldness in the future of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Furthermore, McGonagall actually buys Harry the finest broom on the market so he can bring home the Cup? Isn't that kind of like a football coach bribing his star players?

These are nitpicks, of course, more about the book than the film, and it's not like Columbus could alter Harry's already iconic look. But it's the director's responsibility to shift my focus away from the minutiae and contrivances, especially in a light-hearted romp such as this. Starting with the third installment, the series took a firm left into young adult literature from of children's books, but the first two are all about the spectacle. What a shame that Columbus and Kloves so utterly fail to convey any of it.