Harry Potter review

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 review

I went to see this film yesterday with Moogdroog as I had nothing else to do, except buy some zip-lock plastic bags. Apparently “Harry Potter” is quite popular with the kids these days. I think I read a couple of pages of the first “Harry Potter” book once, but then I put it down and decided to read Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and Dino Buzzati’s The Tartar Steppe and Gore Vidal’s Julian instead, because I realised I’m not twelve fucking years old.

Anyway, this film is directed by some guy whose name I forget. Daniel Redcliff plays the eponymous wizard “Harry Potter”, Emily Watson is a she-wizard, and Rupert Grinch is a ginger wizard. Together they form a kind of wizard triumvirate. Towards the end of the film Emily Watson and Rupert Grinch started kissing, which I didn’t like very much.

“Harry Potter” and his friends are fighting against a villain who was constantly referred to as “you-know-who”, which was annoying, as I didn’t know who. I shall call him nose-face man. He had a pet snake.


I feel a bit bad for the producers because they obviously picked the three young leads when they were about five years old, and none of them has turned out to be a particularly good actor. Emily Watson wanders around looking vaguely fretful, and Rupert Grinch is sort of there and not there at the same time, and Daniel Redcliff stands about like a pouty cornstalk. Sometimes he turns his head to look at things, like he’s been caught in a lateral gust of wind.

There was a bit with a dragon, which was good fun, and a big fight when nose-face man and a load of evil wizards attacked Hogwards Wizard School. As far as I could understand it, which isn’t very far, “Harry Potter” had to destroy a group of things which had part of the soul of nose-face man in them, like a cup, and a tiara, and himself. He died and ended up talking to Michael Gambon in an Apple Store for a while, and then (for reasons that were not clear) he came alive again at a dramatically appropriate moment, had another fight, and won.


Er, spoiler alert.

I quite enjoyed it, on the whole. The CGI was overblown and cumbersome, but that was more or less necessary in order to fill the vacuum left by Daniel Redcliff’s lack of presence. The dialogue was crappy, but then “Harry Potter” is meant for children, isn’t it? Apart from all the violence and terrifying monsters.

In fact the scariest scene of all was at the very end, when the triumvirate see off the next generation of Hogwards Wizard School students at King’s Cross. They are meant to be about 40, and they look like this:


Final verdict: 10/10!!!!11