Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince

Someone needs to send David Yates a copy of The Complete Idiot's Guide to Creating A Suspenseful Action Sequence. After all, the director who, unfortunately, will helm the Harry Potter series to its very end, is a master of the anti climax. Last time, he ruined one of the most exciting, imaginative, and unique sequences by reducing the department of mysteries sequence to a disappointing shell of its former grandeur in his disappointing adaptation of one of the best books in the series, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Now Yates has been given a smaller-scale book to deal with, and has slowed down the frantic, rushing pace he set on Order of the Pheonix to the brisk but uneventful filler that is Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince. The film moves by quickly enough, filling the first two hours with the entertaining and humorous teen drama that Rowling used to form the backdrop for her epic series finale. However, unlike Rowling, Yates doesn't reward his audiences for their trek through the melodrama with an intense and powerful finale, but with another weak, rushed effort at emotion that falls flat. Its exceedingly frustrating to watch Yates's adaptations as he is handed increasingly interesting material and continues to make it uninteresting. He managed to get the pacing right for most of the movie, making it entertaining, but when it comes to a scene of real weight and tension he disappoints due to his utter failure to create suspense. His action scenes are so briskly paced that they are over before audiences can feel any of the atmosphere he creates. His visual prowess is apparent in his construction of the final action scene, but unfortunately this impressive yet fairly detached light show is over all too fast, only rewarding us with a few seconds of special effects. The emotional climax of the film is likewise rushed, and while the reactions of the students of Hogwarts to this latest blow they are dealt is touching, he doesn't give us time to feel it. Overall, Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince is a fairly entertaining comedy that fails to convey the urgency and emotion that gave the book a scope that was far grander than its melodramatic setup.

The short version:

|Score: |||||- 5.4/10|

Coming up, a Harry Potter recap? And my long awaited (or not) account of my vacation to Kaua'i.