The trouble with Harry

Despite terrific special effects and funnier gags, "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets" finds a way to make J.K. Rowling's marvelous series into a deadly bore.

By Stephanie Zacharek

Nov 15, 2002 | When a movie is touted, and treated, as an event long before it even reaches the theaters, can it ever become a movie again? In the case of "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets," the second installment of the film franchise based on the hugely successful (and wonderful) series of books by J.K. Rowling, the answer is no.

By now we're all used to heavy marketing campaigns for movies. But movies that actually feel like two-hour-plus marketing campaigns are a relatively new phenomenon. Perfunctory, competent, well-oiled and yet still stultifyingly dull, "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets" sells itself dutifully minute-by-minute -- it's the hardest-working movie in show business. It's also an example of the most dispiriting and dangerous trend in contemporary Hollywood filmmaking. "Chamber of Secrets" was clearly made with the utmost care (and plenty of money), yet it simply withers before us like a choked-off mandrake plant. It's starved for the one moviemaking resource that doesn't cost a lot of money: imagination.

It's frustrating that "Chamber of Secrets" is actually an improvement on the first "Harry Potter" movie. For one thing, it starts out with more wit and life than its predecessor -- the movie's early gags carry you along, fooling you into thinking you might actually be swept into the movie. (One of the early scenes features a nicely levitating cake that ends up splooshed on the head of a la-de-da dinner guest, and it takes a crankier person than I am to resist that sort of thing.)

Some of the special effects are lovely: "Chamber of Secrets" marks the appearance of Dobby, a wrinkled elfin slave creature who can appear and disappear instantaneously. When he snaps his fingers, he dissolves into ripply streaks of smoke that echo his wrinkly skin.

And "Chamber of Secrets" doesn't have the chintzy, Hogwarts-from-a-shopping-cart look that its predecessor had; shot by Roger Pratt ("The End of the Affair"), it's bathed in a softer, sometimes spectral light, making it look less garish and cartoony than the first movie. The picture's gloomier sheen suits the story: "Chamber of Secrets" is a darker and more ominous tale than "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone."

"Chamber of Secrets" has been carefully made, all right. But none of it, unfortunately, adds up to a better movie. Like "Sorcerer's Stone," "Chamber of Secrets" follows the plot of Rowling's book precisely, picking the story up at the very beginning of Harry's second term at Hogwarts School for Witchcraft and Wizardry, the place he has come to call home. (Harry is again played by Daniel Radcliffe, a restrained and serviceable, if unmemorable, actor.)

But before that fresh term can begin, there are two immediate obstacles: Dobby has shown up to warn him that he must under no circumstances return to Hogwarts, or he'll be in grave danger. And Harry's nasty Muggle guardians, the Dursleys (again played by Fiona Shaw and Richard Griffiths), have locked him in his room to prevent him from returning to the school.

Luckily, his pal Ron Weasley (Rupert Grint, whose tireless if well-intentioned mugging becomes wearisome in the movie's first hour and nearly unbearable in its second) swings by to pick him up in the Weasley family's airbound auto. After a few false starts, Harry finally finds himself once again at Hogwarts. There he rejoins the classmates he loves, like the adorable nerdy-girl Hermione Granger (Emma Watson), as well as those he despises, like the devious Draco Malfoy (Tom Felton, who acts as if he's learned everything he knows about hammy villainy from Little Rascals shorts). He's also thrust into a very dangerous adventure: A mysterious hidden chamber has been opened at Hogwarts, and the beast who lives in it is out for blood.

It would be a helpful but boring experiment to watch "Chamber of Secrets" with the book it's based on and a flashlight in hand, comparing, page-by-page, the events that take place in the novel with what director Chris Columbus has put on-screen. I don't think you'd find much digression, or much editing: "Chamber of Secrets," as adapted by screenwriter Steve Kloves, is a filmic replica of its source material, and that's a huge part of the problem.

We all know that the experience of reading is vastly different from that of watching. But Columbus and Kloves seem to be trying to re-create the experience of reading instead of shaping Rowling's story into a movie with its own sense of rhythm and pacing.

Rowling's books are rich, thrillingly episodic and Dickensian, both in the way the stories unfold and in the vast array of colors she uses to shade her characters. But Columbus doesn't understand the difference between adaptation and painstaking translation: He moves along from plot point to plot point as if he were filling in a giant sheet of graph paper. Now Harry, Ron and Hermione will consume a potion that will allow them to take the forms of some of their fellow classmates; now Harry and Ron will visit a giant spider's lair; now professor Dumbledore's phoenix will shed a tear with healing powers -- and so on.

Next Page: Kenneth Branagh as Gilderoy Lockhart, the Cornel West of Hogwarts

• View blog reactions