Film Review: Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows Part Two

As I start to type this review, this film has already grossed $168.55 million dollars, beating The Dark Knight's opening, and making it the highest grossing weekend ever. That's in the U.S. of course, and not being funny, that's the only figure that matters. These kind of things are not contested on U.K. money making.

I found the first part of the Deathly Hallows to be the weakest so far (and as this is the first time I have reviewed a Potter film on this blog, I should point out that I have never read the books and judge the films as exactly that - films), with things being dragged out to almost unbearable lengths. At times the whole thing seemed like an advert  for camping in a forest. None of this was helped by the smallest amount of screen time yet for the adult members of the cast, which really showed how weak the acting of Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint really was.

My expectations for this second part were high though. It simply had to kick off, and remain in that position for the entire running time (mercifully the shortest in the entire series at just over 2 hours), but that still wasn't to be.

We join the film as we left Part One, with Harry (Radcliffe), Hermione (Watson) and Ron (Grint) in search of the remaining Horcruxes, leading to a final confrontation with Lord Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes) who has now secured the Elder Wand, after the death of Dumbledore (Michael Gambon).

Things start promisingly enough, that is after quite a long and drawn out mission to get another Horcrux which involves a Goblin, a Indy style mine car ride and a dragon. After that we get whisked to Hogwarts, where it is clear it will all go down. But once there there are still quite a few superfluous and dragging scenes where not much actually happens. 

When the action does finally kick off, it's great. The attack on Hogwart's is superbly executed, although the deaths of a couple of key characters seems totally glossed over, like there was a missing scene or two somewhere. For characters who have been in several of the films, to not even see their demise seems a bit of a cop out.

I also had a bit of an issue with the final Potter-Voldemort battle. As I said earlier, I haven't read the books, but without giving too much away it all comes down to getting the final Horcrux destroyed, and how that happens was a total "Erm...really?" moment from this writer.

And that's not even mentioning the unintentionally hilarious '19 Years Later' coda that ended the film. Again, don't want to spoil anything but look out for some brilliantly bad facial hair.

But the positives. The action sequences, as stated, are superb. And I really enjoyed seeing the old faces back again, such as Maggie Smith and Jim Broadbent as Professors McGonagall and Slughorn respectively, although the latter was consigned to just making scared faces a bit, with scarce dialogue.

Talking of scare dialogue, I was also glad to see the bare minimum of lines and screen time given to Helena Bonham Carter. I know these are kids films and you can't raise the acting quality bar THAT high but she has consistently sucked in the Harry Potter series and really brought several scenes throughout down a peg or two (although worst performance in the series still goes to David Tennant and his dreadful mugging in Goblet Of Fire, that shit was painful).

Overall though, for a series of films to go this long and not produce any absolute stinkers is a credit to all involved. Things did take a downturn in these last two though, and you can't exactly question why they split them up (money, for those who need telling), but you have to think how much more of an effective film (film, that is, not adaptation) it would have been all in one sitting. Yeah, it would have touched three hours but I think it would have got away with it.

As a late comer to the series (my first cinema Potter was only Deathly Hallows Part One!), I won't miss its cinema presence like I did with say, Lord Of The Rings, but it will leave a gap to be filled, no doubt, by adaptations of other (probably inferior) material. Question is, will J.K. Rowling ever write another Potter book? I hope not. The series is definitely wrapped up now, and anything else (either pre or post the aforementioned coda) would be pretty bad, it has to be said. To be fair, Rowling could scrawl what she had for breakfast in the morning on her toilet wall in her own faeces and it would make her another million, so it's not like she needs the money.

***

Superb action sequences, and a long awaited (by me) shorter running time, but still dragged down a bit with poor acting from the kids (a problem I never really noticed in the earlier films where there was an adult cast supporting them) and some overlong or pointless scenes. Not the ending I hoped for, but a decent enough cap on the franchise.