"Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2," David Yates, Film Review
Who is the worst actor out of the
three young leads of the Harry Potter films?
Daniel Radcliffe grins like a simpleton in a wind tunnel whenever
emotion is required. Emma Watson
sleepwalks through every scene and then there’s Rupert Grint’s clueless
gurning. It’s hard to choose. Grint has to take the prize though. Nothing he does is believable and his
performance consists of saying ‘bloody hell’ a lot.
WARNING: CONTAINS SPOILERS
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After eight films it all gets a
little wearing.
It’s beyond me how any Harry Potter
film made it onto a Top 250 list, but to have just one on the list and that one
to be Deathly Hallows Part 2 is bizarre. Only the first few films of the series rival Hallows 2 for dullness. At least episodes 6 and 7 it had the
occasional memorable scene. The only
scene that works dramatically in Hallows
2 is the raid on Bellatrix's vault.
There are some nice touches of betrayal, magic and adventure there. But the rest of the film is a grim flow of
exposition and CGI battles between rival sets of pixels.
Near the beginning, Radcliffe
interviews a number of characters while Watson and Grint hover mute in the
background. Come on guys, that’s not the
same thing as dramatizing a scene. They
might as well have explained the plot points in captions for all the dramatic
impact of these scenes. It reminded me
of certain mid-novel interviews in late Ballard novels. There’s only one thing to do with scenes like
that. Cut them.
Despite being strung-out, Hallows 2 tries to tie up so many loose
ends that nothing worthwhile is allowed to stay onscreen long enough to be
interesting, especially the more memorable baddies.
Would it be too much to ask to have
Hermione going to the dark side in cahoots with Bellatrix for a while, for
example? For a character-based film, the
characters are curiously underplayed in this film.
But what about Grint and his
acting? Well, it’s a problem because he
is the one who gets the girl.
I guess it’s the personalities of
the characters and their various sexual tensions that explain the popularity of
the books. And of course every possible
combination of lovers has been analysed into the ground by fanboys and
gurls. But whatever happens in the books
(which I haven’t read) the screen versions of the relationships are
ridiculous. Ginny comes out of nowhere
to snog Harry, and Hermione and Ron have got all the chemistry of a magnesium
strip in a bottle of argon. Surely it
would have been better for, I don’t know, Harry and Hermione to get it
together, only for Harry’s vocation to drive them apart, leaving Ron with the
sloppy seconds. Anything would be better
than the unearned relationships that are inflicted on us in this film.
It gets an extra mark for not having a quidditch
match.
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Personal Score: 2/10
This is part of a series of film reviews where I give my comments on IMDB Top 250 films as a writer. The idea is that over time these posts will build into a wide-ranging writing resource.
For more details about the approach I've taken, including some important points about its strengths and weaknesses (I make no claims about my abilities as a film critic or even the accuracy of my comments... but I do stand by the value of a writer's notes on interesting films), see my introductory post here.
This is part of a series of film reviews where I give my comments on IMDB Top 250 films as a writer. The idea is that over time these posts will build into a wide-ranging writing resource.
For more details about the approach I've taken, including some important points about its strengths and weaknesses (I make no claims about my abilities as a film critic or even the accuracy of my comments... but I do stand by the value of a writer's notes on interesting films), see my introductory post here.
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