Movies with Kevin:
'Rickety Enthusiasm' In Harry Potter Movie
© By Kevin Paquet, 2007

"Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" was the 30th movie I reviewed- this is my 69th- and I'm giving this one a tentative vote of confidence.

Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe), a boy wizard with a dark past, a bewildering present and a heavily merchandised future, is returning to Hogwarts™ School of Witchcraft and Wizardry for a fifth hazardous year. Harry is still deeply troubled by the death of his friend Cedric Diggory in a school contest the previous year, and is having no luck at all convincing anyone that the series' bad guy- Lord Voldemort (played by Ralph Fiennes, sans nose)- has returned after being driven from power many years and pages before in an attempt to kill none other than Harry himself. Harry is under deep suspicion from Cornelius Fudge (Robert Hardy), the Minister of Magic, who believes that Albus Dumbledore (Michael Gambon, who replaced another actor who died a few films back) is jockeying for his position.

To keep this supposed insurrection in check, the Ministry has placed Dolores Umbridge (Imelda Staunton) in the school's vacant Defense Against the Dark Arts position. However, under the Ministry-sanctioned training program, the students aren't allowed to learn any spells to defend themselves, which causes Harry and the rest of the class to form an organization called Dumbledore's Army, where Harry teaches a bunch of his classmates how to do spells For Fun and Profit in their spare time. Well, not exactly- especially after Umbridge starts to tighten the screws.

It's hard to pass a fair judgment on this film, due to all the interfering factors. The hype, counter-hype, grade-curving and overall series legacy make it hard for me to figure out what I was expecting.

Rendering an enormous, rambling book down to a coherent movie of bearable length is an achievement in itself, and here the film is an unmitigated success. Victory, too, comes from the fact that the film is the fifth in a series, and the overall quality of each successive film seems to be on a gradual but steady rise.

Worth singling out for praise is the gentle overacting done by much of the cast. The world of the wizards in the Harry Potter books has a rickety enthusiasm to it, and in the characters this has been carried over very effectively, even though other qualities were lost in transition. Snape (Alan Rickman) is very tight-lipped, Umbridge is strongly evocative of Nurse Ratched, Dumbledore is an animated version of CBC news anchor Peter Mansbridge, and the Dursleys, Harry's "foster" family, would not be out of place in an ad for a used car dealership.

In fact, there is nothing in this film I expressly dislike- though there are a few things that I wish were better. Some gentle rewriting has been done to the plot in the name of space, and the romance between Harry and Cho (Kate Leung) is stilted and incomplete. None of these things seriously wound what is truly a hair-raising tale of both action and personal growth, but the team no doubt gathering at this very moment for the next film should probably be asking itself, Okay, what can we do better?

Bonus points for the mistletoe, the fireworks, and Minister Fudge's henchman, who gets the best one-liner of the film. Kevin gives it four stars out of five.