by Daniel Stephens

Created on: July 16, 2009   Last Updated: March 06, 2011

Dir. David Yates; starring Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, Rupert Grint, Tom Felton, Michael Gambon, Jim Broadbent, Helena Bonham Carter, Alan Rickman

David Yates again takes the director's chair for the sixth instalment of the Harry Potter series. As Harry returns to Hogwart's school of wizardry for another year of teenager angst and dark magic, director Yates has the difficult task of adapting J.K. Rowling's overlong and exposition-heavy novel. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince always felt like a prelude to something else in its literal form, as if Rowling knew how she wanted to end her saga but was unwilling to start that conclusion with her sixth book.

The film is much the same. It's a solid effort with some wonderful moments and fantastic production design, score, and special-effects, but Yates with writer Steve Kloves, can't overcome the novel's inadequacies. For a novel that is based far too much in flashback and back-story, the Half Blood Prince as a movie, feels a little disjointed, rushed in places and overcooked in others. Yates goes to the ever-blossoming talent of Rupert Grint's comic asides and Emma Watson's teenage hearbreak to create some character-driven forward momentum, but it detracts from the underlying battle between good and evil. A battle that Rowling unfortunately presents in the book as a series of dream-induced flashbacks that, had Yates featured in their entirety, have made for a very long (even longer than its current two hours forty) film.

Essentially, The Half Blood Prince as a book and a film, is an introduction to a grander concluding story. As such, it never distances itself from a sense of the episodic. It also doesn't work as well as the other films in the series as a stand alone story. It expects that you already know what has happened previously, beginning as it does, only hours after the Order of the Phoenix ended. New viewers therefore will feel immediately alienated, and the lack of a consistent plot which doesn't end satisfactorily, will leave newcomers scratching their heads. Die hard fans of the books will complain Yates left out too much exposition, while fans primarily of the movies (of which I count myself) will begrudge a missed opportunity to make a film that distanced itself from a book that was always going to be troublesome to adapt.

However, you've got to give Yates and Kloves credit as the film starts rather well. Through a hazy, over-exposed frame we see a bruised and bloody Harry Potter under the microscope

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