PoA - Bad Review! - Culture does a bad review of PoA

Summary:
Culture (a UK newspaper) has done a bad review of Prisoner of Azkaban (spoliers!!)

Article:

What follows is a bad review from Culture (a UK newspaper) about Prisoner of Azkaban, there may be spoliers ahead so don't read if you haven't seen the film! You have been warned!

'Before the release of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban we'd all seen pictures of Daniel Radcliffe (Harry), Emma Watson (Hermione) and Rupert Grint (Ron), and were surprised to see that they'd passed out of the magic kingdom of childhood into the turbulent waters of teenagedom. Indeed, that was the distinct selling point of the new film: Potter hits puberty.

'This one promised to be a touch darker and more adult than the others. And who better to handle the dramas of teen life than Alfonso Cauron, director of the classis coming-of-age road movie Y tu mama tambien? The opening scene shows Harry in bed, late at night, doing something dodgy beneath the sheets. His uncle, Vernon (Richard Griffiths), keeps popping in, trying to catch him at it. My God, I thought, Harry has turned into a proper teenage boy! Alas, Harry was only practising the solitary vice of casting spells.

'Okay, it's perhaps too much to expect a seething, pierced Potter who likes to sit in his suburban bedroom listening to Slipknot and reading Baudelaire. But does he have to stay stuck in that childish golly-gosh-you-rotter, lashings-of-ginger-beer world of his? Therein lies the trouble with this film; there's no sense that he's undergoing any change. He gets more excited new broom than a baba like Hermione.

'Without a doubt, this is the weakest of the three films. It's set up to be a story of revenge. A wicked wizard called Sirius Black (Gary Oldman) has escaped from Azkaban prison. It's believed that Black betrayed Harry's parents to Lord Voldemort and was thus responsible for their deaths. Now everyone is convinced Black is seeking revenge by killing Harry.

'Personally, I think this would be a good thing. I belong to that small group of people who say: let's kill harry and crown Hermione. She should be the star; she's the brave one with the brains, not that four-eyed wuss. Watson is a talented actress and is set to become the Hayley Mills of her generation. But throughout the film, everyone is flapping and fussing around Harry, telling him what a remarkable young wizard he is.

'Maybe reading JK Rowling, you get the sense that Harry is someone special, but Cauron doesn't transfer that quality to the screen. Harry seems like a bland and boring kid who couldn't pull a rabbit out of a hat, much less take on a villian like Black. And that's really down to Radcliffe, who has built his career on nothing more than a pair of Potter-like spectacles. The boy can barely act. (Compare him with Haley Joel Osment.) He is totally incapable of portraying fear or any kind of emotion.

'Anyway, the film never really builds up a coherent story line. It loses momentum as it meanders off into a series of set pieces that are executed with various degrees of success. The best thing is not any on-screen magic - there's hardly any here - but the film's comfy Dickensian cosiness. Outside, it's always raining, while inside, kindly old men shuffle around fire-lit rooms, quietly keeping the evil of the world at bay. And it has that Christmassy feel of seeing all those British star faces: Maggie Smith, Robbie Coltrane, Emma Thompson (In a role that would have been perfect for Eleanor Bron), Dawn French et al.

'Yet here's something so amateurish, so Ealing comedy-ish about the look of the film, especially when you compare it to The Lord Of The Rings trilogy. Partly, that has to do with the weak special effects. We get a shruken talking head an a Monstrous Book of Monsters that looks like it was borrowed from a village pantomime. The best effect of the lot are the Dementors - no, not a punk bad that Harry likes, but ghoulish Azkaban guards looking for Black. But where the LotR director, Peter Jackson, sent a shiver down your backside with just a peek at his black, faceless Nazgul, Cauron never hits the spooky mark. Alan Rickman as Professor Snape oozes more menance than all of Cauron's baddies.

'There's nothing here we haven't seen before. And the film is badly edited; Cauron allows scenes to go on far too long. After two hours, Harry's fatigue sets in, and we get a travel-back-in-time sequence that means sitting through a huge chunk of the plot again. Maybe it's time Harry concentrated on his wizard skills; that old magic of his has gone missing'

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