Light your wands (Lumos!): spoilers ahead.
I should make a few things clear before I really get into this review. First, I am a huge Harry Potter fan. I fell in love with the books after I saw the first film, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. Since then, I have attended the midnight premieres of books five through seven and movies three to six. Secondly, I want to make it clear that I am more than willing to view each film separate from the book. I have never disliked one of the Harry Potter films because of a missing plot or scene, simply because I liked the scene from the book. Therefore, when I later state that I dislike the choice of Yates deleting the Hogwarts battle and funeral scenes, it is not because I simply enjoyed the scenes in the book. It is because they serve a purpose; because they work in context of both the book and (would have worked) in the film.
It is very disappointing to me that Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince has achieved a substantially higher rating at Rotten Tomatoes than its predecessor, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (my favorite of the lot, very close to Prisoner of Azkaban).
Roger Ebert states that HP6 is a "darker, more ominous" film, but I remember differently. What I found most aggravating about the film was its mixture of light-hearted romance and creepy, "ominous" (sorry to steal your term, Ebert) scenes. It was unbelievably choppy throughout the film. We would witness a scene where Lavendar Brown, played over-enthusiastically (still comedic, I must say) by Jessie Cave, makes a move toward Ron Weasley, and then we would shift to a scene of Draco Malfoy looming throughout the dark, melancholy hallways of Hogwarts castle. The inconsistency was as bad as Goblet of Fire, where the director seems to be struggling with the tone of the film.
Yet again, Lisa Schwarzbaum at Entertainment Weekly has proven herself as boring as I was throughout the film. Her review is almost a complete summary of the plot instead of an analyzation of its quality. Instead, the only real critique she lends to the film is a short sentence, hardly even a summary:
They've found just the right balance of timeless spiritual profundity and contemporary teen specificity...This is extremely vague, but Schwarzbaum seems to be taking the same view of Ebert and other critics, applauding the film's mixture of comedy and drama. It doesn't make sense that Half-Blood Prince is the "funniest of the films" (as the trio has stated in many interviews) because it has been understood since film three that the films become darker and darker. And, quite frankly, the plotline of HP6 (that being Voldemort's journey to power) is quite dark. The filmmaker failed to commit to the darker tone.
What I found most surprising and pleasing about the film was Jim Broadbent's turn as Professor Slughorn, a character I viewed as both annoying and boring in the book. However, Broadbent brings both comedy and a sad secrecy to the character, making him more human in the film than the books. He was probably the most interesting character throughout, stealing every scene in which he appeared.
The omissions of the small battle scene at Hogwarts and Dumbledore's funeral are bothersome ones. According to an interview, Yates exprssed redundancy toward the insertion of the battle at Hogwarts at the end of the film. I agree, sure, that every Potter film has ended with a large battle climax, but it is a necessary redundancy. We have expected this ending for five films; why change it now? Additionally, the "battle" that did occur after Dumbledore's death was sporatic. In the book, many Death Eaters travel throughout the school and battle students and professors in various hallways. The film, however, shows Bellatrix Lestrange (overly campy in this film) and other Death Eaters travelling through the Great Hall - simply to blow up a few windows and smash some goblets - and then to Hagrid's hut, only to set it on fire and walk away. Their actions don't make sense and serve absolutely no intensity/purpose to the climax.
Dumbledore's funeral in the book allowed readers to focus on Harry's struggle with accepting his death. Instead of focusing on Harry's (our protagonist, mind you) response to his death, we see a collection of students and professors raise their wands in allegiance and make the Dark Mark disappear. There was only a slight emotional pull to this scene, but where was Harry's resolution to this? We followed Harry throughout this entire film as he developed an even closer relationship to the Hogwarts Headmaster, and then leave it abruptly. Again, I do not hold hostility toward the deletion of these scenes because of their absence. Instead, I argue that these scenes were necessary for the film because they work and have a purpose that was otherwise unfelt.
The problem here is not that I am a fanatic of the books, as Dan Kois of the Washington Post suggests. Instead, Yates has created a film undecided in tone and unnecessary in many scenes (why did we need Quidditch this time?). Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is a huge disappointment to the Potter series. But don't worry, Warner Bros., I'll still see the movie again in theaters (probably IMAX), purchase the DVD (the two-disc edition, of course), follow-up with the last two films, and visit the theme park next year. That's all you really want anyway, right?
