Harry Potter and The Goblet of Fire Directed by: Mike Newell Starring: Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, Rupert Grint, Ralph Fiennes.

Oh, where to begin, where to begin?…ah, with what came before.

Harry Potter and The Prisoner of Azkaban was a brilliant film, it was brilliantly acted, expertly directed, the production design was some of the best yet seen in the industry and the overall story was fluid and well adapted. The same cannot be said for The Goblet of Fire.

That being said, allow me to make one thing clear, as a filmmaker, I believe that sequels( or Quadquels) have a RESPONSIBILITY to at the very least live up to the quality of their predecessors. Allow me to also make clear that I did indeed read the fourth Harry Potter book (and for all it’s worth I’ve read all the other ones) and this review will be for those who have read the book and seen the movies.

Well, on to the review. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire follows the young magic casters as they start a new year at Hogwarts school of witchcraft and wizardry in a time threatened by the return of the evil lord Voldemort and his followers. The movie opens with a well adapted sequence showing that, in fact, Voldemort has returned from the netherworld (or from the dead, or from a state of non being, or from a brief Hiatus in the Seychelles, we dont really know where he went). It’s all downhill from there folks. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not a bad movie, it’s worth every penny of the 10 dollars, the problem is that when following a great movie, a sequel cant settle for “not bad” it has a responsibility to excel or at least match the one that came before it. These of course are no easy shoes to fill.

To be fair, the issues in this movie (which we will get to shortly) are partly because of simple circumstance. There is an enormous amount of time pressure ( the actors are in risk of noticably outgrowing their roles) and the troubles that accompany shooting with almost all child actors are hard to surmount….but not impossible. There is also the classic Hollywood belieft hat movies made longer than 2 hours will bore people, the movie runs roughly 3 or so hours and could have stood another 30-40 minutes of content. The entirety of the Quidditch World Cup and the events that follow are compacted into about a 15 minute sequence (the match itself is never shown) and even after squeezing the scene to such a short length they manage to overdramatize the events and thus ruin their signifigance (the books say that no one was hurt, while in the movie we are shown the razing of the entire wizard encampment). Things dont improve once the students arrive at Hogwarts. The Ron-Harry-Hermione arguement dynamic is covered in a brief 30 seconds all told and fails to leave you with the empathy the books inspired. The director leaves no intervening time between the arrival of the students and the start of the Tournament as we are given a somewhat ad hoc introduction to the event(complete with choreographed dance introductions to the 2 competing schools). Halfway through watching the film I was finally able to pin down exactly what didnt feel right, it’s not a Hogwarts movie. The previous movies all had at least 2-3 class sequences (the third movie had a series of memorable classrom sequences some of which served no purpose other than furthering the ambiance of the school) whereas Goblet only has one which is dominated by Mad Eye Moody, their newest Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher. Moody is well cast and acted and is essentially a flawless adaptation if not for the fact that his glass eye had somehow become a strap-on glass eye, ruining his powerful image and turning into somewhat of a comic relief character.