Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Pt II

The final Harry Potter film was as expected: glorious eye-candy with a stellar cast, numerous niggling plot annoyances and overall a rather hollow feeling. Continuing where the seventh film left off, the eighth sees our intrepid dropout trio continuing their collection quest for horcruxes. The first is in Gringott’s banking vaults, where our heroes seem completely indifferent to the several people they end up killing for doing their jobs. The next is in Hogwarts, so there is a rushed homecoming before the search is interrupted by Voldemort himself arriving. All-out war erupts under the banner of Potter, and during the chaos Harry finds and destroys the penultimate horcrux (not counting the twisty accidentally-made one). Here, what Voldemort should do is go ‘oh, hay, I only have one more horcrux, my snake. What I should do is fly him to some remote jungle and hide him away, not take him to battle with me and let him slither around while I’m busy.’ Alas, he makes a fatal mistake, and because of the lame concept of magic wands having allegiances, he loses.

There are some excellent moments here: Snape’s flashback montage told its story with elegance and brevity, teachers getting to show their power is oddly satisfying, and Fiennes pitches Voldemort with the right amount of madness, cruelty and vulnerability. The three central actors have learned to produce convincing, if not ranged, performances, and Helena Bonham Carter’s best moments are acting like Emma Watson accurately enough it’s easy to forget she’s a completely different person.

But the final showdown is so anticlimactic, the book’s hard-hitting deaths are presented with an affecting starkness but then don’t have any discernable affect on the characters and Oscar-winning thesps show up to be totally underused.
I’m not sad to see the end of the Potter movie franchise. The only one of Rowling’s stories I think was good was Prisoner of Azkaban, and that’s a very long way off now. A hollow blockbuster certainly no better than any other fantasy around it.