The Harry Potter franchise has reached a difficult age. With five films in six years, it's grown up very quickly, and with this latest entry bearing the tagline "Join the Rebellion" and the now standard-issue 12A certificate, it's clear Harry's adventures are no longer intended as kids' stuff. At the end of the previous Potter film, I was driven to speculate which directors might be able to take the series in interesting directions. In the event of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, we've ended up with the young Brit David Yates, whom you suspect has been chosen not for his success with the gritty C4 drama Sex Traffic, but because he's a television director making his first feature, and can therefore easily be reined in by the series' producers and the J.K. Rowling estate.Yates does a reasonable job with the opening sequence, trying to convince us a graffiti-strewn underpass might exist in the same universe as an old school so, well, old-school as Hogwarts, but thereafter cedes to the prevailing house style, becoming another of the franchise's reliable pairs of hands. The best I can say about Order of the Phoenix is that it's a safe bet, which may not just be faint praise in a summer of unprecedented movie hype and similar levels of disappointment. With 95% of its likely audience having had some form of contact with the source book, it's safe to say I could probably omit a plot synopsis without leaving too many readers in the dark; let it suffice to note there's a somewhat ill-defined conspiracy, led by the Ministry of Magic's Dolores Umbridge (Imelda Staunton, all pink knitwear and kitten tchotchkes), to take down Hogwarts head Dumbledore (Michael Gambon).
Phoenix wants to persuade us the stakes are higher this time round - Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) and friends even have to sit their first exams - and certainly the mood is tetchier. Early scenes are full of in-fighting and backbiting: in the Hogwarts common room, where the pupils have started to listen to aptly named indie chancers The Ordinary Boys for some reason, that Irish kid who's a dead ringer for Wayne Rooney gives our hero a mouthful, while Harry is noticeably more irritable, complaining "I feel so angry, all the time". To compound this hormonal disquiet, love is in the air: Harry gets his first kiss, which caused all the girls in the screening I attended to gasp as one, and led all the boys to offer a collective "eww". Some things, it seems, never change.
Other elements have. The good news for cineastes is that Phoenix is the first Potter film not to bear a writing credit for Steve Kloves, hopefully a sign that Kloves is set to relaunch his own very promising directorial career. The bad news for everyone is that, in the hands of new screenwriter Michael Goldenberg, this doesn't feel like a very good adaptation; it's a rushed, scrambled attempt to condense 800-odd pages into two hours twenty minutes of screentime. (I have a sneaking admiration for Kloves for bailing on the task.) Goldenberg's screenplay throws away such potentially rich revelations as the discovery of Professor Snape (Alan Rickman)'s bullying at the hands of Potter senior, and certain characters (including Helena Bonham Carter's Bellatrix Lestrange) turn up out of nowhere before vanishing back there.
Over the last half-decade, Harry Potter has proved a cash cow for Warner Bros., and given the revenue they've generated, they'd be silly not to spend the money they have on Order of the Phoenix: on the superior effects work and spectacle, on bringing back all the (admittedly cheap, English) actors recruited to play the Hogwarts staff in previous instalments. Again, man of the match goes to Radcliffe: despite an alarmingly muscular upper body for someone playing a wizard supposedly in his mid-teens, the young star has developed a watchful quality welcome in a character showing signs of clairvoyance, and by way of respite in a film otherwise composed of hissy fits and big bangs.
Still, the overall experience is an unsatisfying one. For non-devotees of the books like myself, previous visits to Hogwarts have appeared overlong and naggingly literal - afraid to leave out just one of the audience's favourite scenes on the page - but with enjoyable moments and performances. This was the first Potter film where I grew convinced there must be a more interesting story going on at a neighbouring comprehensive. (A sidebar: there's an academic study to be written about the differing attitudes of those of us raised on Grange Hill and those being brought up on the softer, sealed off, less provocative world of J.K. Rowling; it might centre on how the two groups perceive Gary Oldman: the angry young man who tore up the screen in the 1980s, latterly recast as the benign, avuncular warlock Sirius Black.)
Still, quibbling about the direction of the Harry Potter films is pretty much on a par with moaning that nobody's done anything interesting with the Bond franchise: a futile railing against both public taste and market forces. By the time you read this review, Order of the Phoenix will have made enough money worldwide for its producers not to have to make any radical changes for the sixth film, and Rowling's new book will have been pre-ordered in such numbers that no-one will dare take any risks bringing Harry Potter 7.0 to the screen. This is the very model of a successful formula that's also not particularly compelling or distinctive; going to see a Harry Potter film has now become every bit as exciting as eating at Burger King. Any signs of life or dissent can be snuffed out with the news Yates has been signed up for the next film. At this point in time, what this franchise needs, if the magic isn't to be completely swamped by everyday corporate cowardice, isn't another safe pair of hands, but a palpable sense of threat; nothing so fleeting as a teenage rebellion, but a full-on insurrection in its ranks.
(July 2007)
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