Prior to watching this film I had neither read the book nor seen Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part I, so watching this movie definitely felt like walking into the middle of a much longer one, or opening a book in the middle. Fortunately, it didn't take me all that long to get up to speed given the urgency with which the story was told. As I want this review to be spoiler-free, I will discuss precious little of the actual story, given the considerable number of twists and turns the narrative takes before the very end.
All that the viewer needs to know is that this is the end; this is the last Harry Potter movie that will ever be made unless and until some troupe of filmmakers decide to reboot the series some twenty-odd years from now. This is the ultimate throw-down between Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe) and the wizard once known as Tom Riddle and now known as Lord Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes). This one's for all the marbles. People die. Tears are shed. Hard decisions are made, and in the end, only one is left standing.
The nice thing about the Potter movies is that they have tended to improve the closer they get to the conclusion. The first two were by-the-numbers in their fealty to the book and simply did not feel terribly compelling to me. It did not help that they were stacked against rival fantasy franchise The Lord of the Rings, which provided an instant point of comparison, with the films of then-series director Chris Columbus' Potter films ultimately losing the fight.
Of course, as everyone who follows these things knows, three years later and roughly 3 billion dollars later the Tolkien adaptations wrapped up, while the Potter series still had several books yet to be adapted, and after Columbus left the series to squander the goodwill he'd earned by unsuccessfully adapting things like the wildly popular musical Rent and the well-received young adult books Percy Jackson and the Olympians, the Potter films got both better and darker as the series progressed.
The series really settled into a nice rhythm when David Yates came on board with the fifth film. There was, from that point onward, a consistency of tone that really served the storytelling well.
Still, as good as the movies got, I never really quite got over the "Tolkien lite" feel that the earlier films conveyed. Maybe it was the urgency of the characters' mission, or something like that, but for some reason I never really quite got the sense of peril that I felt when watching the LOTR characters face off against their enemies, which is ironic considering that all told, the last three Potter films have a higher body count of supporting characters than the LOTR films.
That changed with this film; Yates seriously upped his game. From the music to the effects to the deliciously dark cinematography, Yates dials the sense of menace up to eleven. Certain things like tend to keep levity throughout the film, Helena Bonham-Carter's scenery chewing as Bellatrix LeStrange and Rupert Grint's general goofiness as Ron Weasley are, for the most part, discarded (though Ron and Neville Longbottom still sneak in a chuckle or two), so as not to distract from the fact that this film, as all the marketing material suggests, is all about Harry and Voldemort.
It'll be interesting to see Radcliffe's first mainstream post-Potter role; he may have acted on stage but really, until he gets out there, in a series of mainstream movies, and probably even then, he will always be Harry Potter to the public in the same way Sean Connery, for all of his accolades and even his Oscar, will always be James Bond. Still, the interesting thing to see will be how well he can render a character whose journey does not quite parallel his own the way Harry's did. Sure, he was never a wizard who had to save the world, but just as his character did Radcliffe went from boy to man in the years that the eight movies spanned, starting out tentatively and acquiring experience and confidence as the years and movies passed.
While I'm looking forward to Fiennes' next portrayal of a tortured soul (though not, I must admit to another turn as Hades), I confess I'll look back on his work in this series, and in this film in particular, with some fondness. The Voldemort of this film is decidedly more nuanced than the one who tore up the scenery in the last few he was in; this Voldemort talks about "burying your dead with dignity" and actually comes across as the walking wounded, in stark contrast to Dumbledore who, it is revealed, is far more coldly calculating than we had previously been led to believe. My wife even mentioned to me that one of the biggest revelations of the Deathly Hallows book is just how corrupt Dumbledore really was, something which, while touched upon in the films (though like I said, I haven't seen Part I), is not quite that developed. I wonder how far a bolder filmmaker would have gone with that notion. Still, I have to give Yates and Co. full kudos for that one scene in the third act...
(spoiler alert)
featuring that bloody little Voldemort fetus. That was some seriously creepy stuff that, had it not been handled well, could have earned the movie an 'R' rating, to the obvious detriment of the grosses. Very ballsy stuff.
(end spoiler alert)
It's still not a perfect film, and I cannot discuss my main objections to it because they may involve spoilers, but it was, overall, a well-made film. I'm pretty sure Peter Jackson could have done better with it, but Yates does himself proud.
Definitely a worthy sendoff for one of the most lucrative film franchises of all time.
4.5/5
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