A half-baked ‘Half-Blood Prince’ - Entertainment, Movies - Army Times

A half-baked ‘Half-Blood Prince’

“Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” is a fine argument for a theater policy that would let viewers leave and return at will during a film screening.

That’s because the first 15 minutes of the sixth film in this saga are mesmerizing and the final 30 are pulse-pounding — and they’re the only parts of the film in which the action moves with anything like a purpose.

These opening and closing sequences, which propel us several large steps closer to the ultimate confrontation between Voldermort’s villains and Hogwart’s heroes, underscore the franchise’s greatest strength: its stunningly creative production design and visual effects.

The opening scene has a team of Death Eaters, led by the malevolently unhinged Bellatrix Lestrange (Helena Bonham Carter), wrecking a large swath of London in the service of their Dark Lord, Voldemort.

The last half-hour gets to the point, as Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) and Dumbledore (Michael Gambon) face off against the baddies, who by that point include not only Bellatrix and her pals but also Harry’s perpetually sneering classmate Draco Malfoy (Tom Fenton), as well as the “half-blood prince” of the title, revealed as a prominent franchise character.

Those 45 minutes are grand movie fun; too bad the film is 150 minutes long. You could easily duck out and run errands for all 105 middle minutes and miss nothing of import, though this long, winding road is enlivened somewhat by the addition of yet another great British actor to the Hogwart’s faculty in the form of Professor Horace Slughorn, potion master, played by Jim Broadbent.

I can already feel the righteous indignation of the Chosen One’s legions rising up like a boiling tide. Guess I’ll have to live with that. For me, this film, like most of the others, drags overlong because it’s crammed with elements from J.K. Rowling’s doorstopper tomes that are superfluous to the main story.

You know, the story?

This manifests in ways both small and large. The small: Much time is consumed simply wedging in the dizzying array of touchstones for fans to cross off their mental checklists. (Don’t blink or you’ll miss Robbie Coltrane’s Hagrid.)

Another Quidditch match also is squeezed in for no real reason, though this one could be taken as a clever in-joke on baseball’s steroid scandal, suggesting that Ron may be juicing on a performance-enhancing potion known as “liquid luck.”

The large: When the many minor threads that are a joy to savor on the printed page are cut and pasted to the very different medium of film, they become meandering side trips that slow any narrative drive to a crawl.

The standout example in that regard: With Harry and his best pals Ron (Rupert Grint) and Hermione (Emma Watson) now of the age at which the opposite sex tops their personal agendas, an inordinate amount of time is spent nattering about “snogging,” the British slang for “sucking face.”

The adoring but clingy Lavender Brown (Jessie Cave) has latched onto Ron like a leech and is snogging him at such a furious clip that his lips are chapped. This greatly upsets Hermione, who has developed an unrequited crush on Ron and would much prefer to be the girl laying a big, wet snog on him.

And Harry remains mostly oblivious to the smoldering looks cast his way by Ron’s cute sister Ginny (Bonnie Wright), who yearns to get snogariffic with the boy wizard. But he’s too busy checking his breath in hopes of a little snoggaloggadingdong with the hottie Muggle waitress at his local London coffee shop.

Yes, it’s Snoggapalooza ’09!

Oh, well. This is what the faithful want, this is what they get. It’s not as if anything written here — or in any other review, for that matter — will change anyone’s thinking anyway.

Those who have been true believers from the start will bliss out on the smallest details of “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.” And for those not of the tribe, that train to Hogwart’s is much too far down the track to try jumping on now.

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Rated PG for mildly scary images and violence, mild language and mild sensuality. In fact, should be rated M for mild. Got a rant or rave about the movies? E-mail cvinch@atpco.com