Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009)

Thankfully, after the angst-ridden Order of the Phoenix, the Harry Potter series gets a lot less hormonal and a little more interesting. Where Phoenix was almost pure stall tactic, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince features a significant amount of setup for the seventh and final installment of the wizarding saga. While it may run short on stand-alone plot, Prince has enough pop, sizzle and intrigue to make up for it.

While Harry Potter is in his sixth year at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, Lord Voldemort is gaining power and influence throughout the magical world. Harry keeps himself busy with a lot of things: captaining the Grffyndor Quidditch team, crushing on his best friend’s sister, mastering Potions class thanks to the margin notes of a former student calling himself the ‘Half-Blood Prince,’ and not to mention secret meetings with Headmaster Dumbledore regarding Voldemort’s past. You know, just another year in the life of Harry Potter.

Meanwhile, saucy Slytherin student Draco Malfoy has a secret assignment from Lord Voldemort. Despite his best efforts, Harry figures out that he’s up to something. Naturally, everyone dismisses Harry’s suspicions of Malfoy because the two have been rivals for five years running now. Harry finds himself torn between exposing his fellow student and helping Dumbledore uncover a terrible secret about Lord Voldemort’s past that could be the key to his undoing.

While this sounds like an awful lot to inject into one film, it’s actually not. Half-Blood Prince is two and a half hours long. Learning about Voldemort’s past is stretched out throughout the film but the titular Half-Blood Prince component is largely glossed over and the big reveal is anti-climactic. The book featured more build-up for the Prince and the film fails to deliver that. Everything else is wedged somewhere in between these pieces.

My initial take on this film was that it was every bit as much a piece of filler as Order of the Phoenix. Additional viewings have brought me back from that assertion. While all the romance, class work and suspicion of Malfoy are mostly superfluous, Voldemort’s history is important to take in. It may seem like a big waste of time but it’s laying the groundwork for the next chapter. In terms of setting up back story and mythology, Prince is very much like Prisoner of Azkaban. Cogs are set in place and pieces are put in motion. It’s subtle at first but easy to recognize later on.

Half-Blood Prince is not, however, Prisoner of Azkaban’s equal. Where the third installment had a footloose quality to dispensing the necessary information, Prince holds your hand similar to Dumbledore assisting Harry through the apparation process. The information given to us is more important than before and its nature is much darker so the filmmakers take care to make sure we download and process it properly. I was a little dissatisfied with this approach but it was also one of the shortcomings of the book, so we’ll leave it there.

As important as uncovering Voldemort’s secret is, there is a surprising lack of urgency presented in the film. Perhaps it only comes off that way because I have read the book and know what’s coming, but I was hoping for Harry to be a little more frantic in his approach- you know, the way he persistently goes after Malfoy. That whole plot line was a little uninteresting because in the book it was unclear what Malfoy was up to. In the movie, there is no subtlety and Malfoy’s methods are revealed early on (though the ends he is working for remains a secret until the final reel).

I like the brooding tone of this film. It works because Harry is now 16 years old and author J.K. Rowling wrote Harry very age-appropriate for what he is tasked with. I wasn’t as crazy about the first two Potter books or films because I’m not big into childrens stories. I understand that the target audience was for kids but I can’t help but prefer a dash of darkness, having cut my popular fiction teeth on Stephen King. The filmmakers go a little overboard on the digital grading but they get the mood right nine times out of ten here.

I like Prince for bucking a few trends for Potter stories. First, Voldemort only appears in flashbacks. Just like Prisoner Azkaban, Harry isn’t predictably thrown into some kind of confrontation with the Dark Lord in the end only to miraculously escape. It’s nice to be outside of Voldemort for a change. Second, I actually enjoyed the further reduction of Hogwarts classroom instruction. All the spells were cute in the beginning but alliterative charms and cleverly coined incantations sound goofy coming out of the mouths of teenagers.

One thing I didn’t like about the film was the ending. A key scene from the book is cut out that provided both a moderate amount of resolution and a terrific launching point into the seventh and final chapter of the Harry Potter series. Instead, the filmmakers deliver an awkward fade-to-black moment that works on a ‘okay, things are really uncertain now’ level but there is no driving force leaving us to believe that we are about to embark on the final leg of the journey.

In the end, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is par for the course. You would think that it would be easier to judge this film, having digested five films before it. The story is sufficient enough to not be disappointing but the effects are a little off too much of the time. Perhaps I will be better able to put my finger on this film once I see how all the groundwork laid out here plays out in the two-part finale, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Until then, this one is right up the middle.

RATING: 3.5 out of 5