Review: Harry Potter & The Half Blood Prince

SPOILERS BELOW

What a disappointment.

Of all of the Harry Potter movies, this one is the worst. If you are NOT a Potter aficionado, you will have trouble with this movie.

I consider myself to be a Potter fan of the minor sort, anyway, and I had trouble with it. It has been four years since I read the book upon which this movie is based and it’s been since the last movie was out that I watched any of the movies.

Suffice it to say, I’d forgotten a lot. So a little reminder as to who the characters were and why they mattered or why I should care would have been welcome. The movie instead felt like it simply dumped into the middle of something and good luck to you in trying to catch on.

It was also boring. I started looking at my watch about an hour into the movie.

The teen angst, while well done, I suppose, added nothing to the story. I certainly could have done without that in exchange for some reminders of who was whom.

Perhaps it was because I was anticipating the ending that I did not care for the rest of it. However, even Dumbledore’s death was anticlimactic in the movie.

I also recall that I did not care much for this book. It was not my favorite of the seven. That is not to say that I disliked it so much that I couldn’t read it, I just didn’t think that it held up in measure to the earlier volumes. And the upcoming Deathly Hollows seemed to me to be written with the screen in mind and it suffered for that.

A good movie should be a good movie unto itself, even if it is a series of movies, and this one fails that test. I am sure it will do well at the box office simply because of the name, but that alone does not make for a fine film.

This one was so bad that I likely won’t go see the remaining two at the theater. I may save my $10 and wait for them to come out on HBO.