For all of their charms, none of the films based on J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series have really worked. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone suffered for trying to blaze through too much plot in too little time, and was severely hamstrung by the Prince of Hacks and third-tier Spielberg wannabee Chris Columbus, who managed to direct without ever once communicating a sense of wonder or delight at this magical world. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, while managing to solve the first film’s story problems, intensified the director’s limitations and couldn’t overcome the weakness of the original novel (the least plotty of the series). Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban finally managed to get a director with a remarkable sense of style and a good rapport with young actors in the person of Alfonso Cuarón, but had a beyond-incoherent screenplay that functioned best as a series of illustrations for the book. A pity, because the films have included some of the finest actors in Britain, and a team of production designers who should be able to die happy after what they’ve given birth to.
Thankfully, we finally have a film that makes good on the promise of the whole damn series: Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, directed by of all unlikely people Mike Newell. It’s very easy to point to the primary reason this film works as well as it does: on his fourth attempt, Steven Kloves has finally realized that the best way to approach the material was to be utterly merciless (reportedly at the behest of Newell, who refused to make a double length two-part feature). And so, gone are all of the tiny niceties that made the rest of the films so faithful to Rowling’s world: if it’s not plot, it’s gone. The wholesale slashing of subplots and incidental moments will no doubt annoy many of the book’s fans, but it leaves a lean and sleek film (okay, it’s 157 minutes, but they’re very well-paced). It’s a lesson they should have already learned from Peter Jackson, who chopped off huge chunks of The Lord of the Rings, pissing off many (including myself), but leaving a plot that existed on its own. Here, we finally have a Potter film that doesn’t need the original novel as reference material. This one is its own movie.
And a hell of a movie: this is one dark and brooding fantasy. We all knew the books got darker, and sure enough the films have, too: by the end of Goblet of Fire, they’ve finally begun trafficking in the visual language of horror movies. It’s a great fit, because deep inside all good fantasy is horror. Dark things happen, and they are well-earned: the death of a major character, which didn’t do a whole lot for me in the book, took on the impact of a shot to the gut when I saw it here.
The returning cast is, of course, great: Maggie Smith and Michael Gambon especially among the adults (Gambon is far more comfortable than in Prisoner of Azkaban), and Rupert Grint and Emma Watson prove to have been incredibly serendipitous choices. Daniel Radcliffe is nothing great as Harry, but he doesn’t manage to do too much damage. I just hope he gets some emergency acting classes before Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Ralph Fiennes is utterly perfect in his small performance as Voldemort; there’s something just so bored about his voice that makes the character far scarier than anything I thought of while reading. The banal face of evil, and all that.
Not that this review matters. If you saw the first three, you’ll see this one. If you didn’t, I can’t necessarily argue that it’s worth the investment just to get to this point; but it is a strong film, the first that does any work on its own that I can see keeping the series alive in people’s hearts in the years to come.
This review was edited for tidiness on 22 January, 2017