SPOILERS HEREIN
The Harry Potter franchise manages to end as weakly as it started, and persistently was for the last decade, with a big-budget abomination of Waterworld proportions (in two parts, no less!) saved, nay, consummated! commercially only by its predetermined market success as adaptation; we need not wonder why mainstream creativity in cinema is dying (evidenced by the dearth of original, non-adapted projects in the modern age) while gubbins like this is cleaning up at the box office. The stunted, shakily adapted script is acted out with utter disinterest and disassociation by a mixture of fine actors blithely disgracing themselves and the young trio of dunderheads whose negligible skills seem to have deteriorated as they have physically matured. The CGI is patchy, Ralph Fiennes’ performance as Voldemort hilariously borders on the homophobic, and the “19 Years Later” epilogue is literally one of the worst things ever filmed, along with the seventeen-and-a-half odd hours of this franchise, the length of which, in celluloid, with grace will be enough to circumnavigate the throat of late capitalism to self-asphyxiate.
Words: Oisín Murphy
