Movie Review: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

In the name of context and credentials, here's my scorecard of responses to the first four Harry Potter movies: Loved Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. Liked Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. Liked Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Loved Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.

Love-Like-Like-Love, otherwise known as: four-for-four. This is another way of saying that, with three different directors shepherding the first four films to the screen, I obviously appreciate and endorse the source material: author J.K. Rowling's influential and beloved children's novels about the bespectacled teen wizard. That brings us to the fifth entry in the big-screen, fantasy-drama series, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. It goes squarely and proudly in the Like column.

In HPATOOTP, nightmare-plagued Harry (the returning Daniel Radcliffe) is ordered to appear before the Ministry of Magic to defend himself against charges that he performed under-aged magic outside of the Hogwarts Academy — even though he was at the time merely defending himself against Dementors.

Headmaster Dumbledore (Michael Gambon) intercedes on Harry's behalf, thus allowing Harry to begin the new school year. His newest nemesis is the new Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher, the tyrannical and megalomaniacal bureaucrat Dolores Umbridge (played with villainous gusto by the prodigiously skilled Imelda Staunton), teaching her Ministry-approved and increasingly-irrelevant course in defensive magic. She seizes power at Hogwarts even as rumors of the return of the dreaded Lord Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes) are being denied, disbelieved, and scoffed at.

Harry and his rebellious friends (including Hermione and Ron, played by the returning Emma Watson and Rupert Grint), form Dumbledore's Army, and Harry trains them as freedom fighters — yep, it's a form of Potter training — so they will be able to defend themselves against the Dark Arts, should such a need arise. It will, of course.

Oh, and by the way, in case you hadn't heard, Harry also gets, with an assist from some convenient mistletoe, his first on-screen kiss. Radcliffe, an 18-year-old playing a 15-year-old, is fine in the title role, mixing callowness, pluck, anger, fear, frustration, and teenage longing and angst. Director David Yates, his background in British television, works from a screenplay by Michael Goldenberg (this is the first HP flick not scripted by Steve Kloves, who returns for the next one).

Goldenberg, whose credits include Peter Pan and Contact, had to compress a nearly-900-page novel. Actually, the longest book so far has been shaped into the shortest movie. And, it should probably be mentioned that, for grandchild or grandparent alike, no Harry Potter movie is so self-contained that it isn't clearer or more accessible to anyone familiar with previous installments.

In this one, Yates announces his desire to raise the darkness and edginess ante in the very first scene, and the film remains less playful and young-grandchild-friendly — that is, more intense and scary — than any previous installment, as indicated by its PG-13 rating for "sequences of fantasy violence and frightening images."

Yates’ integration of the casually spectacular special effects is admirably smooth and serviceable, never distracting from the narrative. In his first major movie, the director's approach is more workmanlike than inspired, more prosaic than wildly creative. But that's probably an appropriate style to adopt, this being a "middle" adventure in the series, and thus one not offering much in the way of dramatic closure.

That is to say, as thoroughly watchable as HPATOOTP is, we never quite escape the feeling that we're on our way to somewhere and that we're not going to get there during this sitting. We'll see whether Yates flaps his directorial wings a bit differently and more freely next time out, as he's already signed to direct Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, due next year.

For now, we are once again off to see the wizard, who has cast yet another spiffy spell in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Are you — that is, we — Pottered out yet, with two movie-screen episodes to go? Not even close.