Radcliffe pouts reasonably well, but has yet to develop the skill to make that pouting feel emotionally substantive. There are also the usual growing pains and, somewhat less thrillingly, no small amount of teenage angst. In between feats of derring-do with digitally enhanced dragons, there are dining-room flirtations, schoolyard confrontations and a gaggle of visiting girls who line up like so many Madelines, only to break ranks like La Femme Nikita. This time, the story pivots on the Triwizard Tournament, a competition that finds Harry risking life and limb against three young challengers and a litany of more menacing foes. Like his predecessor, Alfonso Cuarón, who brought new beauty and depth to the series, the director Mike Newell embraces the saga's dark side with flair. The slithering snake and shivering caretaker who inaugurate "The Goblet of Fire" make it clear that the PG action has been ratcheted up to PG-13. If the world of the first two installments, "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" and "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets," both directed by the aggressively upbeat Chris Columbus, represented some kind of paradise for the boy wizard, it was a paradise that, we come to see, would soon be lost. These poor creatures are not in the novel, but they cleverly bookend "Azbakan," setting the stage for the scarier, more dire and serious story immediately to follow, as well as for the darker stories yet to come. In "Azkaban," a giant tree whacks a bird out of the air both at the start and at the close in "Goblet of Fire," it's people who get whacked. Rowling's grasp on the fantastic: at once susceptibly human and wholly alien, a geeky outsider and an awesomely cool kid, Harry holds up a mirror to those who curl up with books and congregate in theaters, taking flight in their imaginations.Īs did the last film, "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban," the new one opens and ends on an ominous note. As those who have cracked the spines of the books know, their genius rests as much in Harry's dual identity as in Ms. Orphaned at 1 by the malevolent wizard Lord Voldemort, Harry has developed over the years, books and films from a sentimental Dickensian figure into a prickly adolescent for whom girls now present almost as serious a problem as the Dark Lord. Rowling and the directors of all four films have reminded us. This is the second time that Harry (Daniel Radcliffe), now 14, has experienced childhood's end, of course, as Ms. In a scene of startling intensity, one boy dies while another is delivered from the malevolent force that has steadily wended its way through J. And, as in the book "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" on which this latest and happily satisfying film adaptation is based, childhood ends with screams and a final shudder in a graveyard crowded with tombstones and evil. Childhood ends for Harry Potter, the young wizard with the zigzag scar and phantasmagorical world of troubles, not long after the dragons have roared and the merpeople have screeched their empty threats through broken teeth.
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