My "Harry Potter 6" rave is live at The Oregonian's Web site....
"Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" strikes me as being -- by an order of magnitude -- the strongest (or at least the most mature, subtle and emotional) entry in the series thus far.
The teen stars have all sprouted into hormonal little proto-adults, and they all turn in their calmest, most nuanced performances yet as boarding-school wizards fighting the growing threat of Lord Voldemort. (Emma Watson's eyebrows make perhaps the biggest acting breakthrough of all by remaining, I kid you not, almost entirely still for the movie's entire 153-minute running time.)
Best of all, director David Yates avoids shoving "magic" and "wonder" down the viewer's throat at every turn -- instead diving more deeply into the relationships and the drama than previous installments.
It probably doesn't hurt that "Half-Blood Prince," the sixth story in the series, breaks with tradition on several key levels. For starters, it's far less driven by a self-contained Scooby-Doo mystery than earlier entries, and finally lays out some key bits of backstory. This time, Hogwarts headmaster Dumbledore (Michael Gambon) gives Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) an undercover gig: Get close to daffy, regretful Potions professor Horace Slughorn (played by Jim Broadbent, who's fantastic, even when he's asked to give a sad speech about his pet fish).
Harry's mission is to find out the deadly secret Slughorn learned but never shared about young Voldemort. It's a secret that could provide the key to finally stopping "the most dangerous dark wizard of all time" -- even as that dark wizard starts mounting supernatural terrorist attacks and plotting key assassinations.
But the Dumbledore/Harry buddy-cop movie frequently takes a back seat to a more relatable mystery: adolescence.
Yates also directed the fifth film, "Order of the Phoenix," and gave that movie's relatively thin story a more relaxed tone -- dwelling on character bits, conversations and the beginnings of teen romance. In "Half-Blood Prince," Yates and screenwriter Steve Kloves take all that quite a bit further, working with stronger source material by J.K. Rowling. The new film is awash in (occasionally hilarious) teen confusion, and the cast steps up to meet the challenge of their increasingly mature dialogue.
There's an especially wonderful arc for Ron Weasley (Rupert Grint), who finds his niche (and an adoring female fan base) as the new Quidditch goalie, and Alan Rickman finally delivers on the promise of his casting by getting to do more than glower dyspeptically as Professor Snape. Even "Potter" actors who weren't known for their subtlety in previous films manage to up their game: Tom Felton in particular dredges up a surprising (for him) amount of anguish as Draco Malfoy, who may not be quite as evil as he imagines himself to be. It's a major breakthrough.
But that's the minor miracle of "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince": Six films in, it almost feels like it's booting up a new-and-improved, darker, earthier, more grown-up and visually sophisticated trilogy. (The next and final novel is being adapted as two films, to be shot back-to-back and released starting in 2010).
Yes, on one level, the series is simply maturing with its characters (and the "Harry Potter" audience), but there's more going on here than that. The first few "Potter" films certainly had their charms, especially the gorgeous fan-favorite "Prisoner of Azkaban," but they also hammered home that we were entering A World of Magic and Wonder Set to John Williams Music, and there was a certain sameness to the stories. Yates, by contrast, throws away even more seamless special effects as background detail -- focusing on muted character moments and a story that starts building a genuine sense of dread that won't be resolved until sometime in 2011.
Even when Yates pauses to linger on the conjuring -- as he does when Dumbledore and Slughorn cast a spell that causes a room to clean itself -- Yates undercuts it by having Dumbledore say, "That was fun. Mind if I use the loo?," then asks to borrow a knitting magazine.
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A-minus; 153 min.; rated PG for scary images, some violence, language and mild sensuality.
'Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince' (The Oregonian, Tuesday, July 14, 2009)
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