Harry Potter and the
Chamber of Secrets could go, as a sequel, one of three ways – as good as
the first one if not a little better, leaps and bounds better than the first,
or a dreadful second coming. The first one, Sorcerer’s Stone, was actually quite good, but the second one improves on the first by
jumping straight into the plot, which is:Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe) ignores several warnings not to return to Hogwarts for his second year at the wizarding school, even hitching a ride in a flying car owned by the family of his chum Ron Weasley (Rupert Grint). But upon arrival and reuniting with Hermione Granger (Emma Watson), Harry finds that a dark secret from Hogwarts’s past has resurfaced, and students are beginning to fall now that the “Chamber of Secrets” has been opened.
First of all, I lightly complained that much of Sorcerer’s Stone felt a little plotless, meandering and reveling in the world-building until the somewhat plot-heavy third act. Chamber of Secrets immediately rectifies that and dives headlong into the plot – revealing, in fact, that we’ve already been in the midst of the plot because of the long history of Hogwarts. The film’s opening scene finds Harry being told by the house elf Dobby that he must not return, with the movie containing a dual mystery of the identity of Salazar Slytherin’s heir and what it means for said heir to open the Chamber of Secrets. The mystery angle here is perhaps sharper than in the first one, foregrounded as it is through each of the character interactions and classroom sequences, as when Maggie Smith’s Professor McGonagall provides a mini-exposition lecture on the stakes of the attacks plaguing students.
As a result, the atmosphere is grimmer the second time around, though returning director Chris Columbus doesn’t make it unbearable or inconsistent with the first. There remains the sense of wonderment amid great danger – something key, I think, for a film which is ostensibly a children’s movie but wants to retain that adult audience – and there are several shots of the castle interiors that are frankly beautiful. Additionally, the film is wisely aware of the need to do things differently while retaining many of the familiar trappings; for instance, there’s another Quidditch match (as, I expect, there is in every film), but it’s satisfyingly different from Harry’s first outing on a broomstick.
The best addition made by Chamber of Secrets, about which I cannot say enough, is that of Kenneth Branagh as new professor Gilderoy Lockhart. In what feels a bit like a caricature of his own often self-aggrandizing Bardolatry, Branagh is uproariously funny as the infinitely conceited Lockhart, who quotes liberally from his own collected works, citing his own marvelous deeds, and blustering his way past anyone who so much as intimates he might be slightly full of it. I’ve talked about scene stealers on this blog before, but Branagh practically reinvents the concept and walks away with the film entire with this performance. It bears repeating, because I’m not exaggerating here; every sequence with Gilderoy Lockhart had me in fits of hysterics. Chamber of Secrets is worth the watch, if only for Branagh’s exceedingly delightful performance.
Fortunately, there are many other elements worth enjoying in Chamber of Secrets. Columbus’s swan song for the franchise is a fine note on which to end for him, the rest of the supporting cast are quite charming in their own way, and the world of Harry Potter feels deeper for all that the film contributes to the larger mythology of the character.
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