...or Harry 6, as the theater described it. Half Blood Prince was in fact the sixth of the seven Harry Potter movies. However this movie, it's the sixth of eight film adaptations of the Potter stories.
And that was my only problem with it: it doesn't quite have the "eleventh hour, things are about to get really, really bad" feeling it needs to, despite the way it ends. (With the death of a major character, and a life changing decision by Harry, both of which seem like afterthoughts.)
I suppose director David Yates is saving that feeling for the next movie (the first half of a two-part version of the final novel).
But that's too bad, considering how dark Prince is from the beginning. The movie uses wisps of black smoke as its template, from the closing credits to the Wicked Witch-esque clouds that Voldemort's Death Eaters travel around on. A scary bunch, the Death Eaters, led here by Helena Bonham Carter's Bellatrix Lestrange, who seems to set fire to everything she touches.
(Sharp-eyed viewers will notice Ralph Ineson -- he played David Brent's malignant "friend" Chris Finch on the British Office -- in a non-speaking role as Death Eater Amycus Carrow, who has a larger role in the final book.)
Still, I don't want to complain too much, because there's so much here to like. It's the best looking of all the movies, everything coming across in dark, rich tones. The main cast -- the three kids, Michael Gambon, Maggie Smith and the excellent Alan Rickman (or should that be "Al-lan Rick-man"?) -- are all comfortable in their roles. Tom Felton, who'd basically been a bratty rich kid as Harry nemesis Draco Malfoy in the first few movies, has more to do here, showing us an even darker, more tortured side to his character.
And with each new Harry Potter movie comes a new role for an acclaimed British actor. This time out its Jim Broadbent as Professor Slughorn, a man who's both haunted (by a memory of the young Tom Riddle) and shallow (he "collects" promising students so he'll have names to drop later). I was about to say -- jokingly -- that the only British actors left to be featured in the Potter movies are Bill Nighy and Helen Mirren, until I read that one of them -- Nighy -- will pop up in the seventh installment as Rufus Scrimgeour. It's inspired casting. Let's hope the final two movies are just as inspired.
Tom Coombe
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