Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009)

After something akin to an allergic reaction to Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, I very nearly gave up on this review series. Equal parts uneven and uninteresting, Order seemed decidedly disorderly – a pun I wish I’d thought up last month. Instead, I forged on; I’ve consumed a lot of lackluster media solely in the name of completionism, but fortunately returning director David Yates seems to have learned his lesson with Half-Blood Prince, which is on the whole much more engaging and unified than its predecessor.

Now in his sixth year at Hogwarts, Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe) becomes a closer confidante to his headmaster Albus Dumbledore (Michael Gambon), who brings Harry along when incoming Potions professor Horace Slughorn (Jim Broadbent) is hired. Harry soon learns, though, that Slughorn has been hired because he knows valuable information about the dark lord Voldemort. While Harry’s friends Ron (Rupert Grint) and Hermione (Emma Watson) wrestle with their feelings for each other, Harry and Dumbledore pursue the last bit of hidden knowledge needed to defeat Voldemort.

Right off the bat, Yates demonstrates a much stronger command of the visual language of film, establishing in the film’s opening shot the central theme – Dumbledore, having seen firsthand the consequences of keeping Harry in the dark, elects to trust his star pupil. After much of the confusion of Order, wondering what the central throughline was, there’s a pleasant “Aha!” at the beginning of Prince. And indeed, throughout we see Yates communicating silently with his audience, allowing us to glean from the visual that which we need to know. We have very few ponderous monologues or, at the other end of the spectrum, moments of ungraspable speculation; the film tells us what we need to know in a way natural to the medium.

It helps that you have wonderfully expressive yet subtle performances, first by the teenage cast who have really come into their own. Last time I reviewed this film, as a younger man I bemoaned the “angsty teenage romance” that pervades the film. Now that I’m older, wiser, and fresher on the franchise, I see what’s actually happening here is that the actors are (perhaps for the first time) allowed to humanize their characters and give them a few emotions besides stock tropes of “stoic,” “goofy,” and “brainy” (respectively). Furthermore, it’s a treat to see Alan Rickman as Snape and Broadbent’s Slughorn given stretching room for those fine thespians to vivify their characters.

It’s Michael Gambon, surprisingly, who ends up being something of a scene-stealer. Though I’ve never been sold on Gambon as a replacement for the late Richard Harris (I’ve always wondered what Peter O’Toole could have done with the part), he does pretty impressive work with Dumbledore, who’s nowhere near as stern and shouty as he’s been. Instead, we get a pretty close approximation of the Dumbledore from the books, much more contemplative and compassionate, which Gambon layers on as a natural role-reversal from his earlier interpretation of the character. This is the Dumbledore I wish we’d gotten all along, but in light of the way this film ends (I’m being cautiously vague, even though I’m sure this “spoiler” is right up there with Rosebud in terms of a statute of limitations) it’s a much more sobered and thoughtful performance than we might have been led to expect.

The film is overall more focused than the last one, and even though the book split its attention between flashbacks and present-day movement toward the seventh book, the film finds a much more confident identity in its present, giving Harry something very tangible for which to fight while deepening the mythology of the universe. Even the last-minute cliffhanger of sorts, which teases the narrative center of the final film(s), ties into the main theme of friendship and trust (which, actually, links up with the major twist of this film as well). What you have, then, is a much better organized Harry Potter film in which each element is deeply integrated into the main storyline and theme. It is, in short, a much more successful penultimate feature film than I’d presumed possible from Yates. Half-Blood Prince is a full-blood success.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is rated PG for “scary images, some violence, language and mild sensuality.” Spells and their occasionally bloody after-effects, as well as a few creepy creatures and a looming sense of peril at every turn (including one spectacular jump moment near the film's climax), could be objectionable as far as "scary images [and] some violence" are concerned. The snogging in this film ("mild sensuality") isn't much to write home about, though it dominates a lot of the main characters' focus.