Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince

One of the more anticipated films of this summer, HARRY POTTER AND THE HALF-BLOOD PRINCE can be summed up in one word - boring. This movie wasn't even an hour long before I found my eyelids starting to droop. Millions of dollars, a built-in audience, merchandising galore and the best they can do is this?

Adapting the mammoth, latter Harry Potter books was always going to be a challenge. What to keep? What to eject? Until now, the movies have made fairly intelligent choices, sacrificing non-essential subplots and background detail; losing only the kind of elements that people who'd read the books would be sad to see them cut.

All that’s changed. Director David Yates and screenwriter Steve Kloves seem to have come over deliberately obscure with their choices this time, devoting huge portions of the film to subplots about Harry and his chums’ teenage romances, while treating the plot with apparent disinterest – an unfortunate necessity to be dealt with in as few lines as possible.

Strange, really, since there are many other angles the film could have taken. This could be Voldemort’s film: the book details his origins in a series of flashbacks, which here are reduced to two (arguably three – one’s revisited). It could have Dumbledore’s film (considering his fate), but the relationship between Harry and his mentor remains as underdeveloped as ever, cordial and distant when it should be poignant and charming.

Not that Half Blood Prince is a disaster, just a disappointment. There’s much to enjoy. This is the wittiest film so far, with plenty of genuinely funny moments. The opening scenes of the Death Eaters wreaking havoc in the real world are simply stunning (so much so, you wonder if that’s where all the budget went and why the climax is so dull), and the film has the most exciting Quidditch scenes yet. Jim Broadbent is superb as new Hogwarts teacher Slughorn, a bumbling has-been who at one point delivers a confession of such touching sincerity that it’s the unexpected highlight of the film. And, at last, Alan Rickman’s wonderfully adopted Snape gets more than a cameo appearance for the first time since film one, and he makes the most of every glacially-delivered line(maybe they could've taken care of his hair properly, greasy and oily remember!?). Even the romance stick is well-handled, to be fair... there’s just too much of it.

In the end,the plot is left rattling around and forced to agree with Hermione’s line in the last scene that it’s all been "a waste of time".Quite why Yates and Kloves decided to move the series so far away from its fantasy adventure heartland is puzzling. Then again, maybe our Twilight generation will lap it up. Snape does look a bit like a vampire...