Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows part two
Eau Claire Market Calgary, July 18, 2011
Movie #46 for 2011
Picture this: I’m in Calgary, Alberta. My girlfriend’s US work visa has just been approved and we’ve had a boozy lunch to celebrate. Now we’ve got 36 hours to kill until her passport is returned, it’s the middle of the afternoon and it’s about to crap down with rain. And Harry Potter’s just come out. Guess what we did next?
I’ve immensely enjoyed myself in the last eight Harry Potter movies. But I don’t really know why. It’s certainly not because they are good films (the third in the series, directed by ALFONSO CUARON (Children of Men) is the notable exception) but for some unfathomable reason, I find them compelling and engaging. Even despite not knowing what’s going on - I haven’t read the books, so only about 40% of the plot of the last four films made any sense to me.
It can’t have been easy for writer STEVE KLOVES to adapt the books, especially as they got bigger and so much more unwieldy. But I also don’t think he did that good a job of it. I'm continually frustrated by the flux of characters who are crucial in one film, are mentioned in the next and then are never heard of again. (My gf who has read the books says that, actually, Kloves did a very good job indeed of wrangling half decent films out of books so dense and convoluted.) In addition, DAVID YATES, who has directed the last four films, directs with a style I find pretty bland and often uneven (perhaps he’s much better suited to his excellent BBC mini-series work including State of Play and The Way We Live Now).
In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part Two - the conclusion of the behemoth story and the final show down between Harry Potter and Voldemort - there’s very little logical cause and effect. Even a magical universe must have its own internal logic, but here the maths on danger and consequences is out of whack. I have no problem buying into magic and enchantments, but I had trouble discerning when our heroes were in real danger (as opposed to the kind of danger they seemed to able to easily magic their way out of).
It is, however, a suitably dark and gritty ending to the franchise that has built this battle up to be catastrophically world-ending. And it has much of the action that was missing from the last film (and I mean action in the sense of "things happening" not "things exploding", although there is certainly plenty of that too).
So far, so fine, if not outstanding. What really made me want to punch things was the epilogue of the whole saga. So, they all went through this amazingly world changing, apocalyptic seven-year-long event that destroyed Hogwarts and killed so many of their friends and family only to have them all grow up, get married to each other, have 2.4 children and preserve the status quo? Is that supposed to be a metaphor for a perspective on coming of age? Or is J. K. Rowling just a really big conservative? Either way, I’ll happily pretend the last four minutes never happened and offer a two-and-a-half star rating accordingly.
