From the archive: "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince"

During an idle moment in the early Harry Potter films, I began to wonder if these adaptations might mature alongside their demographic and performers, and that future instalments, brought to the screen by directors better schooled in the ways of the world, might arrive with 15 or even 18 certificates; after all, the audience of eight-year-olds who turned out for 2001's Philosopher's Stone would now be sixteen, and surely ready for what the BBFC deem violent scenes and moderate sex references. It hasn't happened: though the Potter films stepped up a level from PG to 12A with 2005's Goblet of Fire, it's stayed there ever since, the risk minimised by the succession of safe hands taking up the directorial reins.

In short, the franchise has found itself stuck in the terrible teens, and by all accounts, the last couple of years have been more terrible for this franchise than most: reports surfaced of disastrous test screenings, reshoots and a release date change for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, which allowed Robert Pattinson, Potter cast-off and star of last winter's replacement tween-fave Twilight, to overtake Daniel Radcliffe as the unthreatening teen pin-up de nos jours. Certainly, the omens didn't look good: the poster shorthand HP6 makes the film sound like the latest in a particular line of photocopiers, although that wouldn't be entirely inapt for a series that has previously appeared content to Xerox whole pages and subplots from the sacred Rowling texts without modulation; audiences gathered globally to watch a book, rather than experience a film. (Compare any of those early films to the unfettered and immersive imagination on display in Coraline, and you can see the Potter films' limitations as movies.)

The resulting film remains choppy and disjointed, and dependent upon the prior knowledge that might smooth the cracks between its episodic chunks of plot, but it also forms tribute to the sporadic power of a particular kind of corporate thinking: a demonstration of how a reportedly failing industrial process could be turned round to arrive at a product that is wholly functional - no mean feat in a summer of cash-ins and rip-offs - and which even, in its closing stages, starts to attain the proportions of something rather distinctive and striking.

Perhaps it's the return of screenwriter Steve Kloves, absent from 2007's very ordinary Order of the Phoenix, who has some experience of compressing several hundred pages of Rowlingprose into a 150-page script, and whose track record as a writer-director (The Fabulous Baker Boys, Flesh and Bone) hints at an affinity with atmospheric, even adult material. Half-Blood Prince is a film of gathering storms and newly tempestuous hormones, beginning with the collapse of the Millennium Bridge, a rare excursion into the world beyond Hogwarts, and an early sign that lives will be at stake with all this magic flying around. There's plenty to set wands twitching elsewhere, too, not least an intensifying of relations between Rupert Grint's Ron and Emma Watson's Hermione, and the death of one key character: for the first time, our young wizard hero will get his nose bloodied and his feet wet.

Behind the camera, David Yates remains one of those safe pairs of hands mentioned earlier, although having him at the helm - rather than the American Chris Columbus, Mexico's Alfonso Cuaron, or the transatlantic wanderer Mike Newell - helps to underline the Englishness of the Potter world, which is one way of holding out against the homogenisation of culture these films represent. Together with the gifted cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel (French, but we'll let it slide), Yates mines rich seams of atmosphere from quaint country villages in the dead of night, slide-rule rows of terraced housing, snow-covered moors on which another of Harry's classmates will meet a terrible fate.

The Hogwarts scenes continue to play to the traditional strengths of the British film industry, both in their attention to detail in production and costume design (here evident in everything from defaced textbooks to a deceased arachnid; special mention must go to the blinking lioness hat adorning Luna Lovegood's head at one point) and a certain idiosyncrasy of performance: the most animated element isn't the filigree effects work, but the endlessly contorting features of Jim Broadbent as sottish potions professor Horace Slughorn, who drinks to forget.

There's something honourable in the way the producers have so far resisted the use of American guest stars whose names might add a further $50m to the overseas box office, and these choice character parts - Alan Rickman's Snape, here realising his destiny; Michael Gambon's Dumbledore; Helena Bonham Carter, filthily gorgeous as Bellatrix Lestrange - make the Potter films infinitely preferable to the noisily inhuman robotics of the Transformers/Terminator movies; indeed, without them, Half-Blood Prince's denouement wouldn't assume the tragic weight it undoubtedly, and somewhat unexpectedly, does.

It's just the kids I worry for. In their very Englishness, the Potter films have become governed by an excess of discipline - it's perhaps why so many parents, trying to get their offspring to settle down at night, have taken these books to heart - at the expense of much mischief or spontaneity. The three young leads have now settled comfortably into these roles, and convince entirely as a gang with their own secrets and shorthand; the film's freshest moments find Grint and Radcliffe goofing about in corridors and train carriages, trying to get away with things the cramped plotting wouldn't usually allow.

More of this would be welcome in the final instalments, but there are ominous signs Ron, Harry and Hermione are growing up resigned to their own good behaviour. Casting her eye over the principals at an early stage in Half-Blood Prince, Maggie Smith's Professor McGonagall wonders out loud, "Why is it always you three?" Grint's response - "I've been asking myself the same question for six years" - is both an unusual instance of self-awareness for this series, and marked by the weariness of a young actor who can't quite believe he's still wearing school uniform this far into his career.

(July 2009)