Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1

2010 monkey-maker

Rating: 12/20

Plot: Harry Potter and his buddies are on a hunt for pieces of Voldemort's soul and the sword that will destroy them. If I had to divide my soul into seven bits, I'd hide the pieces in the following: my disc golf bag, my beat-up copy of Revenge of the Lawn, my autographed picture of Peter Mayhew (That's right, bitches!) that my brother gave me, my koala cup from the zoo that I drink tea out of, my Samurai Jack action figure, the souvenir penny with a picture of the three-eyed guy that I got at a Ripley's Believe It or Not, and Harry Potter's forehead. Then, I could fulfill a life-long dream of playing hide-and-seek with Hermione.

I am glad that Radcliffe, Watson, and Grint were able to do all of these movies. I wish Richard Harris would have been able to Dumbledore his way through all of these, but them's the breaks. This entry in the series is really dull and very poorly paced. As J.K. became more and more verbose with her books, the movies stayed about the same length. Chopping inevitably had to occur. This book is, I believe, a little shorter than the book or two preceding it, and most of the book describes camping. Camping is really kind of boring anyway, so to stretch this into essentially a five-hour movie doesn't make much sense. Well, unless you're trying to fill Hermione's magic bottomless bag thing with wizard cash, I guess. This juxtaposes scenes of the wizard trio camping with some jumpy and barely coherent action sequences. Director David Yates really only has one trick up his directorial sleeve (like a wizard's sleeve only without the perverse connotation): jerking the camera around. During a wand fight, the camera whirls higgledy-piggledy, and things get so wobbly during a chase through a forest that I'm pretty sure I would have had a seizure if I had seen this in the theater. I'm glad I wasn't a kid when these movies came out. I would have probably run around my big yard with a stick while screaming, "Halitosis bonerificus!" and jerking around so much that my neighbors would have thought I was epileptic. The special effects are still really good for the most part, the exception being when some good-looking CGI in the dark suddenly turns into a car chase thing that looks like it came right from Matrix II where the light makes the CGI look terrible. But the whimsy of the early movies is completely gone and replaced with nothing but dread. No, I don't think the tone of these last couple movies should match the first few, but it does suffer from not having the emotional versatility of some of those. There's a scene I really want to see in the final installment of this cash cow, but I'm not in a hurry. Speaking of that, was Alan Rickman in this movie for less than five minutes or was that my imagination?

And before you ask--No, my autographed picture of Peter Mayhew is not for sale. Neither is my soul. J.K. Rowlings' soul might be though if the price is right.