Posted: 11/21/2005

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

(2005)

by Aaron Riccio

If you’re already of the opinion that Harry Potter’s latest film exploitation (The Goblet of Fire) is “magical,” “magnificent,” or any of those other overly under-descriptive words, then Potter off. This review’s not for you. For the rest of you, I’ve got another word for this film. Excremental, in the literal sense: waste material, expelled from the body (that’s the book) after digestion (that’s mastication, which rightfully sounds like masturbation).

The Prisoner of Azkaban was filled with nuance and detailed characters, plot, environment and above all else, adventure. Director Alfonso Cuarón didn’t just make love to J. K. Rowling’s world, he was tantric with it. Mike Newell, his replacement for this fourth film in the series, well … he’s prematurely ejaculated all over it, as if he couldn’t help but gush at the prospect of directing a movie he couldn’t lose money on.

Newell isn’t a bad director (he made Donnie Brasco), but he’s about as qualified to direct high-budget fantasy as Simon Wells (who may be remembered for the animated Balto) was to adapt his grandfather’s The Time Machine. (That’s only a little more qualified than me, in case you’re confused as to the scale.) And despite all my negativity, Newell does preserve J. K. Rowling’s text (although this forces him to include her miscarriage of pace, a sporadic appearance of secondary characters, and whistle-thin humor). In fact, he’s even managed to fine-tune the comedy so that the inevitable climax is morbidly efficient (thanks, no doubt, to a menacing Ralph Fiennes). At last, there is an end to all that precarious emotional juggling from the earlier films: it all comes crashing down here.

However, all Newell has done is to preserve J. K. Rowling’s text. He hasn’t added anything, and the action sequences and special effects are so dismal that one wonders why this was even made into a movie at all. (The money.) That I found the books more exciting either speaks volumes (pun intended) of my nature as bibliophile or, as I’d prefer to think, that Newell is incapable of adventure. He’s a man of brooding, not of action, as the wrong-turn direction of many characters shows. For instance, Ron Weasley (Rupert Grint) grows angry with Harry for some reason or another (one we’re led to believe is jealousy). Perhaps it’s because this plotline is swiftly abandoned and barely explored, that more people don’t notice that this is some of the worst acting ever. The emotion is pancake-flat, as if the actor was told to brood, and that’s what shows up on camera. Not anger, but the result of an actor being instructed to be angry. They are perhaps so true to the book that they cease to be actors in the film; they are narrators of the book instead.

As narrators, they are cold and emotionally distanced, and this already abridged novel is once more removed from being viscerally exciting. The Goblet of Fire was over eight-hundred pages long (and the film’s still 150 minutes or so), so the cutting is necessary, but it makes it even more important to develop character, rather than just throwing it at us. Sadly, despite some precious (and therefore generic) comments about how awkward puberty is, the characters don’t change, so there’s just a lot of redundant moments spent idling away screen time. A shame, really, considering how far back the more charismatic adults have been pushed. Alan Rickman’s marvelously acerbic Snape appears for about four minutes, and Gary Oldman’s Sirius for even less (and then, only as a badly rendered head).

Admittedly, the whole thing’s part of a bigger picture, but the emphasis just seems off. Newell grounds us in the muggle world of things, and even with a population of dragons and mermen and Lord Voldemort himself, it never quite gets going as fantasy. I think Newell just likes to linger on the easier moments, though he even screws up the big Hogwart’s Ball (for which no size or scope is ever given). Either he doesn’t like a challenge or he’s just not up to it: this is the equivalent of a master pianist choosing to linger on the rests between notes—he could hit them (perhaps), but we’ll never know.

After a lot of expository set pieces, the majority of which fail to make the spectacular anything more than dulling spectacle, Newell finally starts working on the plot. It’s obvious he’s still reluctant to indulge in the exciting story though—Harry as an unwilling participant in the Triwizard Tournament—seeing as how the three trials (centerpieces of the book) are so glossed over here. There should be a sense of the epic (David and Goliath), seeing as how Harry’s supposedly outmatched (though we never see how proficient the other three students in the tournament are); instead, Harry never wavers. This is Daniel Radcliffe’s fault: he’s got a script in hand, plus a director, and an agent; there’s nothing he can’t do. So when he’s face-to-face with a dragon, it’s not intensity or horror in those bespectacled eyes … it’s boredom. (This yawn might also stem from the CG itself: these are the worst special effects of any Potter film yet.)

All the wonders that Cuarón found in the previous installment have withered here, languishing under the mundane aspirations of Newell. It’s disappointing. What should have been darker than Azkaban is light and without substance. And it’s not seat-of-the-pants either: it’s constant tedium, punctuated by possibility. It’s for that glimmer of hope that I’m willing to chalk this one up to adolescence: Harry has now officially crossed from child to troubled teen. The books only get darker and more complex from here, and if Mr. Potter ever gets a director capable of showing those things again, a director who can pull that kind of performance out of such reticent actors, maybe we’ll have another good film. Until then, as I said before, Potter off.

Aaron Riccio is a critic based in NYC.

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