Reviewish upon a Star: Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

I have a friend who used to look exactly like Harry Potter. He had amusingly toussled hair, a strong, vaugely loyal chin and a pair of glasses straight out of The Oxford Graduate's Guide to Fashion. And I teased him about it all the time: "Hurr hurr, look at him, he looks like Harry Potter", I would say, amazingly witty as I am. Come to think of it, I think the last time I did this was three weeks ago, which may be why my friend doesn't talk to me very much.

The joke, however, is on me: I went to see Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire tonight (Tomorrow in three minutes! Wooo!), and Daniel Radcliffe now looks disturbingly like a somewhat hotter version of me. I could apply and be the back of his head for the next movie, if it wasn't for my multiple skin diseases. He even has the same tiny bald patch I do-right on the front of his big shiny head-and the same weird crooky thing in his nose, albeit in a way that doesn't make him look like a man metamorphosing into a fish, and hence differentiates him from myself. I spent most of the movie marvelling about what an ironic, bastardly thing fate is.

And I did that because the Movie isn't very good. It has its moments- The ending, all the bits with Ron, the Hogwarts Clubbing Scene-but these sit nastily with some awful ones, such as the start, which resembles an FMV from the worst Final Fantasy game ever, and makes about as much sense. Indeed, some of the CGI is appallingly bad, made even worse by the fact that the Director clearly thinks that making a Movie "dark" entails making almost every single shot look like it was shot through a radiation cloud.

The Director. This is interesting in HP4, because I think he's simultaneously the best and worst director the films have had. On the one hand he's managed to get brilliant performances from everyone-there was only one cringeworthy scene from Harry to stop me thinking about how my chin was more masculine than his, and Cho and Ron and Snape and the others are great, except Dumbledore, who appears to be drunk through the whole Movie. But then there's all kinds of alcohol in the wizarding world. On the other, he's absolutely pants at the bit where he's actually directing. I didn't think it was possible to inject less Magic into the series than Chris Columbus, but Mike Newall does exactly that, using unimaginative shot after unimaginative shot to make Hogwarts seem like a sort of duller, more death-filled version of Oxbridge, as opposed to a seething tapestry of awesomeness and wow, despite using the same eye-gougingly beautiful Hogwarts setup the last Director did. And it's this that damages the Movie more than anything, more than the cuts nobody really cares about (bar the ones at the start, which are stupid, and the making the maze boring and rubbish, which is worse), more than the fact the main bad guy is played by Doctor Who, servant of all things good, more than the fact the Dark Lord, despite being so amazingly dark, appears to only have six followers. The Movie feels like part of a franchise, and nothing more, a Thriller with precious little actualy Thrilling or stunning, which is a real, real shame. The last Movie did capture the Spirit of the Books, in an awe inspiring and beautiful way. This one makes a race away from a Dragon boring. Sucks.

It's not a Bad Movie. It's not even an Average one. But it is, like the first two before it, one which clearly has the potential to be so, so much more than it actualy is, due to the stupid amount of potential fizzing out of it at every level. At times, Goblet of Fire is worse than Chamber of Secrets. I can think of no more incomprehensible way to render my mild disappointment.

...The Score sucks, too. If they don't bring back John Williams for the Seventh Movie I will not be a happy Daniel Radcliffe lookalike.