by MARK SLUTSKY

The Harry Potter movies just never stop coming, do they? The Lord of the Rings and Star Wars have both already dropped out of the race. But you get the feeling that the wizardly manchild is indefatigable. Every year or two, he and his buddies, now ageing visibly, return for another overplotted tour ’round the old Hogwarts grounds.

Now I’ve got nothing against the Harry Potter books—in fact, like everybody else in the world, I find them pretty darn readable, for the most part. But Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, which hits cinemas in movie form this week, has some serious weaknesses—particularly the first 150 pages, an endless expository slog taking the form of a trip to the “Quidditch World Cup.” After that, however, the book picks up steam with the return to Hogwarts and the re-emergence of Harry’s old foe, the dreaded wizard Voldemort. So it should have made for a good entry in the series, but something along the line went wrong.

Mike Newell (Four Weddings and a Funeral) is the director this time around, filling the shoes of Alfonso Cuarón and, before him, Chris Columbus. Cuarón had the good idea of sharpening and darkening the Potter aesthetic, and his version (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban) had great atmosphere, if it didn’t quite hang together plotwise. It was also, thankfully, shorter than its predecessors.

While it seems like Newell attempted to keep the new-and-improved dark atmosphere, he’s not as successful as Cuaròn at setting the tone. Too much of Goblet of Fire looks just murky, and even weird (although there are a couple of bizarrely ’70s-ish shots that are admirably incongruous). He also completely fumbles the storytelling.

In the new film, the Hogwarts School of Magic is hosting a tournament wherein chosen students from three schools participate in various magical challenges. Although our hero Harry (played again by Daniel Radcliffe) doesn’t apply for the competition, his name seems to appear anyway, and he’s forced to compete in some dangerous games (these are the movie’s best sequences: a chase from a Hungarian dragon, an underwater search-and-rescue mission, and a dip into a labyrinth). Soon it becomes clear that dark forces are at work and... yeah, I know you knew that part already—dark forces tend to be at work in these movies.

The problem is, as entertaining as these events are on the page, they’re strung together without any semblance of logic or sense whatsoever, and I can’t imagine how somebody who hasn’t read the book could possibly follow along. Even the characterization is lazy: Harry himself, although never the most colourful of guys, is particularly blank here, vaguely worried, but otherwise motiveless.

The worst is the viewer never really gets a chance to enjoy just hangin’ in writer J.K. Rowling’s comfortable world, which is one of the series’ greatest pleasures. You feel hurried along from one confusing plot point to another, and the movie feels more like something the studio had to do, rather than something anybody might ever want to see.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire opens Friday, Nov. 18

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