- UK release: July 2009
- Director: David Yates · Writer: Steve Kloves
- Studio / distributor: Warner Bros.; Heyday Films
- Genre: Fantasy adventure / coming-of-age mystery · Runtime: 153 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- Main cast: Daniel Radcliffe (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix) as Harry Potter; Rupert Grint (Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire) as Ron Weasley; Emma Watson (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban) as Hermione Granger; Michael Gambon (Gosford Park, The Singing Detective) as Albus Dumbledore; Tom Felton (The Borrowers) as Draco Malfoy
- IMDb: 7.6 / 10 · Rotten Tomatoes: 84% critics / 78% audience · My rating: 8 / 10
Six films in, the Harry Potter series has quietly become the most reliable franchise in British cinema, and Half-Blood Prince is the moment it stops pretending to be for children. David Yates, who steadied the ship with Order of the Phoenix, stays in the chair, and the confidence shows. This is the entry where the schoolyear plot and the war plot finally start sharing the same room, where the cast have grown into actors rather than child performers, and where the whole thing is photographed as though somebody decided the magic should hurt.
The setup
Voldemort is no longer a rumour. He is out there, and the wizarding world is losing people. Harry returns to Hogwarts for his sixth year carrying a secondhand potions textbook scrawled with corrections by a previous owner who signs himself the Half-Blood Prince, and the annotations make him, overnight, the best young potioneer in the school. While Harry is enjoying that, Dumbledore takes him aside for a different sort of education: a guided tour through Voldemort’s past, assembled from borrowed memories, that is meant to reveal how the man made himself so hard to kill. Around the edges of all this, Draco Malfoy is moving with a new and frightened purpose, tasked with something he cannot tell anyone about.
There is also, this being sixteen-year-olds, a great deal of who fancies whom. The film gives that as much weight as the mythology, and is right to.
The cast
The trio have arrived. Daniel Radcliffe carries the darker, lonelier Harry without the stiffness that used to creep in, and he is genuinely funny in a sequence involving a stroke of liquid luck. Rupert Grint gets the broadest comedy and lands it, all helpless adolescent bewilderment as two girls compete for his attention. Emma Watson does the hardest work of the three, playing wounded rather than clever for once, and a scene of her crying on a staircase is the most grown-up thing any of them has done in the series.
The adults remain a national-treasure roll call, but this is Michael Gambon’s film. His Dumbledore is warmer and more tired here, a mentor visibly spending himself, and Gambon plays the weariness with real tenderness. Tom Felton, given almost nothing to say, builds a haunted, cornered Draco out of silences and shadows, the best thing he has done in the part. Jim Broadbent arrives as Professor Slughorn, a vain, frightened, sherry-warm old snob hiding something, and he is a delight, the rare new addition who feels like he has always been there.
The craft
Bruno Delbonnel shoots the film in drained silvers and storm-light greys, and it is the best-looking Potter by a distance. Hogwarts has never felt this much like a real, draughty, candlelit building under siege. Yates lets scenes breathe, which is the film’s gamble and largely its strength: long stretches of quiet, of corridors and confidences and unspoken dread, punctuated by sudden violence that lands harder for the calm around it. The set pieces, a burning marsh attack on the Burrow, the awful business at the lake near the end, are staged for atmosphere rather than noise. Nicholas Hooper’s score knows when to vanish. After the overstuffed earlier films, the restraint is welcome.
How it stacks up
Against Order of the Phoenix, this is the more assured film, less busy and more felt, with Yates trusting the material in a way he could not quite afford to last time. Against Prisoner of Azkaban, still the high-water mark for sheer directorial personality, it is a touch less inventive but more emotionally complete. What it most resembles is a very good middle volume of a long novel: it is structurally a bridge, and it knows it. The complaint that it withholds the final confrontation is true and beside the point, because the series has always been a serial, and this is one of its strongest single instalments.
Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are warm, sitting around 84%, praising the maturity and the look while noting that the film is a setup for a finale it declines to deliver. Audiences are a little cooler at 78%, and you can guess why: the comparative scarcity of spectacle and the amount of romance will not be what every twelve-year-old came for. I land with the critics and slightly above the crowd. The slower, sadder, more handsome film is the one I want from this material at this stage, and the teenage comedy is not filler, it is the thing that makes the darkness cost something.
Verdict
This is the Potter film for people who had started to suspect the series was running on brand loyalty. It looks extraordinary, the young cast have finally caught up with the adults, and Gambon and Broadbent give it a melancholy weight. Yes, it is a bridge, and it ends on a held breath rather than a resolution. But it is rewatchable in the way the best of these films are, dense with small pleasures and atmosphere, and it is the moment the franchise earns the grief it is about to ask of us. 8⁄10.
Availability: On general release in UK cinemas now, in standard and IMAX. To DVD and Blu-ray later in the year.
Update
Added since this review first appeared: the two-part Deathly Hallows (2010 and 2011) duly delivered the finale this film sets up, and Yates saw the series out, going on to the Fantastic Beasts films afterwards. Half-Blood Prince has settled in as a fan favourite among the later entries, often singled out for Delbonnel’s cinematography. It is now widely available on disc and digital and streams on the relevant Warner platform depending on region.
BBFC content advice
Rated 12A by the BBFC for moderate threat. The notes below may contain spoilers.
Violence: A character is kicked, leaving blood on his face. After a wand battle, a character has several blood stains on his shirt and blood starts to pool on the floor.
Threat and horror: There is moderate threat including a scene in which Harry and Professor Dumbledore are attacked by menacing looking creatures that have emerged from an underground lake. Harry is pulled into the lake and dragged beneath the water.
Language: There is mild bad language including ‘bloody’ and ‘tosser’. Milder terms include ‘God’, ‘hell’ and ‘git’.
Sex: There are some very mild sexual references, including to ‘snogging’.
Injury detail: There is some sight of blood in the aftermath of violence.
Alcohol and smoking: Adult characters drink alcohol.
Source: British Board of Film Classification (bbfc.co.uk).
