Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

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Has the magic lost its magic? Far from being a bad movie, Harry Potter.6 is still the weakest instalment of the franchise. Director David Yates upped the darkness ante and injected some forward momentum into the half-story that was Order of the Phoenix but can't rescue The Half-Blood Prince from its romantic shackles. The story simply isn't there to begin with. Saying that, if you're heading in just looking forward to spending time with these characters - whatever they do or, as in this case, don't do - this outing will be a lot of fun.

Harry (Radcliffe) is in his 6th year at Hogwarts where there's a new teacher on campus - Horace Slughorn (Jim Broadbent) - who may or may not know more about the Dark Lord than he's letting on. Harry finds a potion book that once belonged to the Half-Blood Prince (Who is he? We'll find out.), which helps him improve his spells. However, Severus Snape (Alan Rickman) has made an unbreakable vow to help Draco Mallfoy (Tom Felton) with a special quest given to him by he-who-cannot-be-named...

In the (overlong) two-and-a-half hours running time, about thirty minutes is devoted to the above plot. The rest is filled with the burgeoning love story between first Ron (Grint) and Lavender Brown (Jessie Cave), and then Ron and Hermione (Watson). Hermione has her own problems in fending off the lascivious advances from Cormac McLaggen (Freddie Storma), while Harry gets the hots for Ron's sister Ginny (Bonnie Wright), who is dating another student. The on-off friendship between Ron and Hermione and watching the crew grow up and experience love for the first time was always a fun and heart-warming subplot in the Potter series - here it takes centre stage. The Half-Blood Prince is a teen romantic comedy with some dark wizardry thrown in. As teen romantic comedies go, it's pretty good; as a dark wizardry adventure romp, it's sadly lacking.

Regular Potter adapter Steve Cloves, back after being dumped for Order of the Phoenix, is starting to run out of ideas on how to keep Voldemort (a) off screen but still threatening and (b) interesting. The latter grants the audience a spooky back-story that sees Tom Riddle's (Hero Fiennes-Tiffin) arrival at Hogwarts and his descent into darkness, which has a real Omen II vibe about it and it works; the former is beginning to look tired and long-winded. But then the Harry Potter name is money-printing machine - it has to be dragged out, which is why the next, and final, book will be split up into two movies.

Although it fully enjoys the characters that inhabit this world, The Half-Blood Prince lacks the action spectacle of Goblet of Fire and it isn't meaty the way Order of the Phoenix was. Not much happens for the exposition-heavy first hour but when the intermittent action does loop around, Yates shows that the nervous energy he brought to its predecessor wasn't a fluke. Boasting some snazzy special effects, the final twenty minutes are worth hanging around for.

Maybe reviewing Potter movies one-at-a-time isn't the best way to go about it - perhaps when the 8-movie box set is released that the overall arc of the story and its characters will emerge as a more intricate and beautiful thing.