| HARRY POTTER AND THE CHAMBER OF SECRETS |
2002 -
UK / USA
Director: Chris Columbus - Reviewed by Linda
And that seems to be the problem (for me, at least) with this series of films. While you watch, you go "oooo!" and "aahhh!" at the technically and artistically accomplished scenes, and you marvel at the visual glory of it all, thinking, "Yes, that's exactly how I imagined..." or "Well, not quite right, but I see where they might have thought that..." But when you leave the theater, it is not like closing a book that you cradle close to you. It is more like simply turning off a TV. Out of sight, out of mind. In this second film of what already looks to be a never-ending franchise, we join Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) and his buddies Ron (Rupert Grint) and Hermione (Emma Watson) for their second year at Hogwarts boarding school for wizardry. We are immediately thrown in to a series of scenes which I can only imagine as each being the ubiquitous first 50 pages of the book... you know, where nothing crucial happens (a flying car, an annoying CGI talking house elf named Dobby, someone comically getting cake on dumped on their head), but 45-freakin'-minutes happen to go by before they even start to even think about anything related to the title of the movie. Students start showing up frozen in movement, petrified like the victims of The Ring, but luckily they aren't dead, but just kind of creepy looking. Messages in blood start showing up on the walls, and Harry starts hearing voices that whisper menacingly, "Kill 'em all! Kill 'em all!" (or maybe that was The X-Files... but you get the idea). Turns out that there are rumblings in the old walls of the school, where a chamber of secrets is rumbling to be opened, something about a monster of evil threatening to become unleashed to purge the school of any "mudbloods" (i.e. those of not-pureblood wizard lineage). Of course Harry and pals get involved, and seem to be the only ones in the school who get picked on in class, find bodies in the hallway, and stumble across all-important clues. Funny how in a school of what appears to be hundreds, everything centers automatically around this group of underclassmen, and they, of course, will be the ones to save the day. The Harry Potter films thus far have a great pedigree of having outstanding supporting actors that appear just long enough to smirk, glower, or simper, but never to truly shine and actually chew scenery. Jason Isaacs, as Luscious... I mean Lucius Malfoy (daddy to sneering vampire-boy Draco) is a nice addition in the sexy/menacing wizard category (see also Alan Rickman as Snape), but doesn't appear often enough. Kenneth Branagh eats up his scenes as the foppish and egotistical new professor Gilderoy Lockhart, but is stuck in a one-note character. And Shirley Henderson is funny and welcomingly weird as Moaning Myrtle, the apparation that lives in the girls' restroom. But the film is so... dense, that your brain ends up going into passive screen-saver mode. Oh, and did I mention that it was scary? If my generation is traumatized by flying monkeys, kids these days will now get to dream about monster-sized spiders and 60-foot lizards with dinosaur-sized fangs that can cut you in half. The Harry Potter books are wonderful, I won't deny that. But I've decided that they would make a better TV series. Stretch the episodic stories out to an hour a week, and don't worry so much about the special effects budget, but instead give the characters a chance to shine. I know that I can care about what happens (as I did in the books), but while watching an excessively bloated special effects extravaganza that lasts almost three hours, well, I start to feel like I have the attention span of one of the five-year-olds in the audience that had more fun running up and down the stairs than watching the movie.
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Before I saw Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, I had asked several people what they had thought of the film, as I tried to decide whether or not to see it before losing all momentum. "So... how was it?" I'd ask. Every time—really, every time—the response would be, "It was better than the first." Then I would dig for a follow-up: "Well, did you LIKE the first?" And for some reason, the person would go glassy-eyed and start mumbling, "Uhhhh... aaahhh..." and be unable to answer. It is almost like the public had gotten the catchphrase "It's better than the first!" stuck in their heads from looking at the perky quotes on the ads, but after that, were left blank of opinions.
