...because I'd feel like I was lying to you if I called this "Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows", in that this really is less than half a film here. The first twenty or so minutes are pretty intense, and then the rest of it is pretty much in tents.
Anyway... plot. Hang on, I left it around here somewhere... *shuffles papers*. Ah. Here. Now. It seems that as we left our heroes at the end of Half Blood Prince (and actually, come to think of it, as we left them at the end of Order Of The Phoenix, plot runs slow in Potterland), Lord Voldermort has returned, and as with last time, pretty much the entire wizarding community is just too damned wussy to do anything about it. So our heroes are determined to do the job themselves, despite being pretty wussy themselves. I mean really guys, you're fighting a war here. You really need to start breaking out bigger guns than charms that disarm and paralyse. Really, if a murderous psychopath is intent on destroying your entire way of life, it's okay to shoot to kill. Man up, people.
So, having determined that a) Voldermort has once again dominated wizarding society and put it under a reign of terror and b) that Voldermort can only be killed by finding the however many bits of his soul he has hidden, and destroying them first, Harry, Ron and Hermione decide to b) track down the objects containing his soul, and a) Get The Fuck Out Of Dodge. And most assuredly, not necessarily in that order. So, we get to the last exciting bit for a while, where they break into the now-Nazi Ministry of Magic and nick one of the Plot Devices. They then run away, and hide in a tent in the middle of nowhere. And there the plot remains, until the end.
After that point, the plot is pretty much "How do we destroy this Plot Device?" "Dunno." "Where are the other plot devices?" "Dunno." "What shall we do next?" "Dunno."
Meanwhile, we get the odd snippet of what Big V is up to via Harry's "Being John Malkovich"-like connection to the inside of Voldermort's head, where he is clearly attempting to find *something* which will allow him to completely obliterate Harry. See guys? THIS IS HOW IT WORKS.
And so, unto the end of the film, where, what with H R and H having completely refused to come out of the bush they're hiding in, the plot sends some secondary characters in to flush them out, and the action starts up again, briefly.
So... complete waste of everyone's time? Well, not entirely. As per usual, the entire British Acting Community have turned up to do their bit, only on this occasion, there's a bit of a scarcity of lines, and so everyone's doing their best with the little they've been given. I was particularly impressed with Tom Felton (Draco Malfoy), who has come a long way from the stage school brat he was in Philosopher's Stone. I'm not sure if he gets a line at all in this film, and if he does, it's nothing much. He does, however, come face to face with Harry, and his face shows that he finally understands why Harry is special, and how the thing that he envied and hated Harry for all this time may actually be the thing that can save him from the thing in the world which he now fears above all else. But he still hates Harry, and is disgusted with himself for being reliant on Harry to save all their asses. It's all in there, and for my money, Felton acts more in that one scene than Radcliffe, Grint and Watson do in the overlong hour and a half the camera spends focussed on them.
That's pretty much the problem then. This film more than any other film in the franchise relies on the three principals to act like actors who can act, and give us a three handed performance that demands our attention on a sparse set. And they can't. It's not wholly their fault; it's not like this is Waiting for Godot they're being asked to perform here. There's so little meat in the script, it'd be hard for great actors to give this stuff any real welly. But at the same time, it's pretty obvious that their acting skills are pretty weak sauce too, and without all the breathless running around they usually do, they've nothing much to bring to the table.
So, see it if you've seen the rest, if you must. But I said that about the last one too, and that means I've now said it about a quarter of the films in this series.
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