Grade: C+
I’ve never been a big “Potter” fan, and to be fair I’ve only seen the first three films in the series. I never really felt compelled to go back and explore where Harry would wind up after “Azkaban.”
I never thought they were bad, I just never thought they were exceptionally good. They were merely perfectly adequate at what they did. So going into “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part I,” I wondered if I would be motivated to go back and see what I’d been missing all these years, and second guess myself for not giving the series a second shot.
Instead, I left feeling more confident than ever in my utter indifference to a series that seems to have the rest of the world enthralled.
“Hallows” doesn’t really open, so much as it does jettison you directly into the action. It skips any exposition in favor of putting you right in the middle of the action, figuring you’ll know you’re way around this world and be able to pick up on the new faces and places that have arrived since you last saw Harry and his friends.
Even with my limited knowledge of the series, I was still able to put together pretty much everything that was happening on screen, and for that I’m grateful. But I have to wonder, if after missing out on three films in the series and still being able to piece together everything on an educated assumption, was there ever really that much there?
As “Hallows” continued, I realized how little any of what was happening on screen meant to me. Harry, Ron and Hermione are older, but the adventures are really the same. There are fantastical creatures run amok, people take potions that yield zany results, Ron is still the comic relief and Hermione is still a know-it-all. It’s the same spiel as “The Sorcerer’s Stone,” just with an older, darker setting. And darker does not mean better.
“Hallows” wants you to buy its darkness, with the way the Mansion Malfoy seen at its outset desperately wants to connote menace, but instead comes off like a cheesy haunted house found at a state fair. Throughout, there’s glimmers of darkness that “Hallows” wants to sell you, that it wants you to make believe this series is grown up and more mature than its ever been, but in that it fails.
Like a teenager dressing in all black with safety pins down his jeans, “Hallows” attempts at being edgy come off as tired and unnecessary. “Azkaban,” the best of the films I’ve seen and–from what I hear–still the best of them all, succeeded because it took storytelling to a new plane. It found maturity not in its content but in its characters’ decisions and the ramifications those decisions had on the story.
There’s no risk here though; the characters and story play out just as you’d expect. “Hallows” is an adventure film that lacks any adventure; there’s never a chance taken other than what’s safest, and it seems like it’s simply filling in the blanks laid out by Rowling’s prior work in order to appease the series’ millions of fans with their millions and millions of dollars at the ready.
It isn’t that being safe is technically wrong; it’s certainly crafted with care. Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, and Emma Watson are all quite good, actually, and I can say that, in the best way possible, I couldn’t ever imagine anyone else playing the roles the way they do. Director David Yates does a fine job holding the film together, and the proceedings move far quicker than expected. But those proceedings, regardless of their efficiency, devolve into steps to reach the goal of making a sound film and nothing more.
For “Potter” fans, “Hallows” is what I imagine to be everything you could want and more. It’s a perfectly competent film that hits every check box one could have regarding what they’d ever want out of this series at this point. However, for anyone else, “Hallows” is bland and unoriginal in only the worst way, whose safeness and absence of any real adventure will leave you wondering, much like myself, what all the fuss was ever about for this series.
Contact the critic at vburnton@asu.edu
