Main cast: Daniel Radcliffe (Harry Potter), Emma Watson (Hermione Granger), Rupert Grint (Ron Weasley), Michael Gambon (Albus Dumbledore), Alan Rickman (Severus Snape), Maggie Smith (Minerva McGonagall), Helena Bonham Carter (Bellatrix Lestrange), Robbie Coltrane (Rubeus Hagrid), Tom Feltom (Draco Malfoy), James Phelps (Fred Weasley), Oliver Phelps (George Weasley), Bonnie Wright (Ginny Weasley), Matthew Lewis (Neville Longbottom), Evanna Lynch (Luna Lovegood), Freddie Stroma (Cormac McLaggen), and Jim Broadbent (Professor Horace Slughorn)
Director: David Yates
Previously, Harry Potter got fed up with having sex with horses and he also faced the tyranny of an evil woman who actually didn’t think he was all that just because he had a dollar sign glowing on his forehead. Two years have passed since then, and now, in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Harry is now 21 pretending to be 16 underneath his permanent layers of pancake make-up.
Harry is hoping to get laid with a woman, especially when he realizes what everyone knows all along: mention that he’s a star and women want to see his magic wand up close. Alas, because writer Steve Kloves clearly didn’t get the memo that Albus Dumbledore is gay, we have the unfortunate implication here that Prof Dumbledore, bless his heart, is watching Harry ever so closely and thwarting his attempts to flirt with heterosexuality. When the story opens, Albus whisks Harry away from scoring with a hot woman and makes Harry whip out his thin reedy wand to Albus instead. Albus then brings Harry to a house where Harry is introduced to another creepy old man who becomes fascinated with Harry.
Albus tells Harry that this old man, Horace Slugborn, used to teach at Hogwarts School of Wizardry. Because Horace has this habit of inviting his favorite students into his personal abode after school for intellectual discussions (that’s what he’d tell anyone who asks, anyway), Albus wants Harry to get himself into Horace’s good graces. You see, Horace used to teach Tom Riddle before Tom decided to become Voldemort, and it is important that Harry allows himself to be pimped to creepy old men like Horace in order to learn what really happened on That Secret Evening between Horace and Tom.
Meanwhile, Ginny Weasley has grown up. Because she has now breasts and luxurious Gwyneth Paltrow locks, she decides that it is time she is seen in the company of men who do not look like her siblings… so she chooses Harry to be the object of her affections. Meanwhile, those creepy little girls who have invested so much in the idea of Harry and Hermione lustily losing their virginity to one another can only howl in despair… if they haven’t moved on to the love story of a sparkling vampire (“Harry who?”), that is. This movie forces Ginny down everyone’s throat, inserting her in scenes usually reserved for Harry, Hermione, and Ron. A guy I know asks me why I am complaining. He likes looking at Bonnie Wright. And Emma Watson. While I have to settle for Daniel Radcliffe and Rupert Grint, sigh. Still, that MTV reject who plays Cormac provides some decent eye candy.
Meanwhile, we can’t have Harry actually doing anything here, so he finds a book by a “Half-Blood Prince” that allows him to cheat and earn him Horace’s unnerving adoration. Horace also gifts Harry with a deus ex machina plot device that has me wondering why Voldemort goes through all the trouble plotting when he could have sipped that deus ex machina thingy and taken over the world in five minutes. Meanwhile, the bad guys in this story burn a house, kill an old guy, and generally run around pretending to be scary even as they go the extra mile to not kill Harry when they have the chance.
Oh, and Draco becomes the Chosen One too. Alas, he has the short straw here, because unlike another Chosen One who doesn’t have to do anything and still be adored by dirty old men and little girls everywhere, he has to sneak around and actually play with his wand in shadowy corners.
As for the movie, it’s the same old thing. Emma Watson is beautiful and talented although she is wasted in this movie because her character is pining inexplicably after a total loser of a comic relief when she could be snogging a hot guy with – one suspects – an actual functional penis. Rupert Grint is… well, he looks like the butt monkey he plays in this movie and he shouldn’t feel bad about this because (a) he gets to kiss some girl and (b) he plays the butt monkey well. We can’t all be lead actors, after all. Daniel Radcliffe still has two facial expressions throughout the whole movie (blank stare and angry stare with gritted jaw), and there are plenty of plot holes in the movie that do not make any sense. On the bright side, Draco is finally cool, although he never stands a chance, poor thing, because the whole world is obsessed with the pathetic and undeserving waste of space called Harry Potter. Also, kudos to the people behind this movie for exposing the creepy old men of Hogwarts that take advantage of these students – as if those poor kids already don’t have enough problems facing with all kinds of life-threatening calamities every term due to these pedophiles’ obsession with Harry Potter and misunderstood Lord Voldemort’s attempts to put a halt to such barbaric English boarding school practices!
Two more movies before Daniel Radcliffe marries a horse and fades back into obscurity!
