My problems with the Harry Potter movies

A typical exciting scene in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1

I have not read the Harry Potter novels. I never had the desire to. So, I don’t know if they suffer from the same problems that the movies have. I say this at the beginning because I want to limit my discussion to the movies only, not the books.

The Harry Potter movies fall into that genre I will, for the sake of this essay, call “good guys vs. bad guys.” Thousands of movies fall into this genre. By definition, the good guys in these films aren’t very interesting because … well, because they’re good guys. These movies rise and fall on the level of the villains in them — the better the villains, the better the “good guys vs. bad guys” movies.

I recently watched Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 and was bored out of my mind. The only halfway decent scene in the entire film was the opening one, what appeared to be a summit conference of all the movie’s villains. But even it petered out. There’s that wonderful banquet scene in Brian De Palma’s Untouchables in which Robert De Niro, as Al Capone, speaks on the values of teamwork as he’s waving a baseball bat. The scene climaxes with Capone bashing the skull of one of his unsuspecting minions with the bat. (According to Jonathan Eig’s excellent book Get Capone, this scene might have been based on an actual incident although in real life three goons had their skulls simultaneously smashed.) In this opening scene in Deathy Hallows, there’s a moment when the main baddie, Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes) asks one of his faithful followers for the use of his wand. I kept waiting for him to do a Capone with it, but he never did.

The rest of the movie, however, concentrated on Harry and his two companions, the equally uninteresting Hermione and Ron. For movies like this to work, we need to see far more of the villains, to understand why they are bad guys and imminent threats to the well-beings of the good guys. Instead, we had loads and loads and loads of Harry, Hermione and Ron camping somewhere and just talking about things that made absolutely no sense unless you had seen all the other movies.

I realize the movies bear Harry Potter’s name in all the titles, but, ‘cmon, we need much much more of the villains in the piece. The movie Shane bore the hero’s name as well, but it also featured that marvelous scene where Jack Wilson (the great Jack Palance) goaded meek Frank “Stonewall” Terry (Elisha Cook Jr.) into a gunfight in which Wilson shot and killed the hapless Stonewall before the latter even got his pistol clear of its holster. For all practical purposes, Wilson coolly murdered Stonewall. The viewer immediately saw what a despicable human being Jack Wilson was.

There are no such scenes in this film. After that opening scene I described earlier, I can’t remember one in the entire movie that didn’t have Harry, Hermione and/or Ron in it. I’m betting Part 2 of the Hallows will correct this major fault to a degree, but it’s been a long, slow, boring slog to get there.