Sunday, 21 November 2010

Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows - Part 1

As The Great Soprendo used to say, ‘Piff, Puff, Poof – the first 40 minutes of this are amazing’. After that, he got bored, lost loads of weight and divorced Victoria Wood. Same thing happened to me. Apart from the crash diet and ‘hilarious’ ex-wife bit.

The early scenes are inventive, exciting and exhilarating. I was hugely impressed. But then our heroes go off on a road trip to look for magicky stuff and the fun just stops. Completely. They just mope about in tents and stare wistfully across foggy landscapes. Ocassionally other things happen like a baddie stops the Hogwarts Express and the passengers tell him he’s a bit of a meanie. Then Harry and Hermione have a little dance because they’re fed up and miserable (I knew how they felt).

This is the first Potter film that we’ve taken Luke to and he was really excited. He looked away a couple of times in the scary bits but he did really well. Even he got bored though – two or three times he said “Is it finished yet?”. We had a ton of popcorn and chocolates to keep us going though.

One of the best bits of the film was the specially commissioned animation to show the story of the Deathly Hallows. This had a really quirky style to it and was a real treat after watching some kids hiking for 3 hours. At times it felt like they were doing an amateur dramatic’s version of Lord Of The Rings.

I didn’t hate the film. I just found it really, really dull. All the great characters are barely in it and they were sorely missed. Stretching the book to two films was a definite mistake in my, er, book.

I still reckon the second part could be a bit tasty though.

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