After Alfonso Cuaron's fast-paced, charming take on the Harry Potter mythos, the future seemed bright. What the film series needed in its next director was someone who could continue rendering the Wizarding World as wondrous while darkly comic and dangerous. Unfortunately, what the series got was Mike Newell. Under his direction, Goblet of Fire is a sequence of terrible decisions from beginning to end.
Every director tackling a Potter film faces the task of determining what to film and what to omit. With the fourth film, Newell and Kloves have chosen and laid out a sequence of events where every scene in the film seems randomly chosen and only vaguely related to the scenes that preceded it.
The Quidditch World Cup opens the movie, and there's the terrible sense that Newell and Kloves don't seem to understand the plot they're transcribing. In the novel, the World Cup introduced the idea of an international wizarding community, the Dark Mark and the Death Eaters, for later use in the story. However, the primary purpose of the World Cup was that Barty Crouch Jr. seized his chance there to escape from his father's Imperius curse and rejoin Lord Voldemort.
However, in the movie, Barty Crouch Jr. is already free and at large and working with Voldemort. So why, why, WHY is the World Cup still in the movie?
Anything the World Cup might have had to offer the movie has been cut out. The Death Eaters march about but don't do anything threatening to establish their presence. The big Quidditch match is never actually seen. The Dark Mark is skimmed over so quickly it may as well have not been there. Newell and Kloves might as well have omitted the World Cup. Surely an alternate version of Harry's summer days leading up to his fourth year would have been better than the pointless World Cup of this movie.
Newell and Kloves also fail to grasp the point of Harry's involvement in the Triwizard Tournament. In the book, this is suspenseful because Harry is being forced to face dangers and threats against which he is completely outmatched. Harry's never felt he deserved his reputation as a powerful wizard, but now he is challenged as one. The three tasks are deadly, overwhelming, and then followed by Harry being forced to fight Voldemort, an enemy whose power entirely dwarfs Harry's. The appeal of Goblet of Fire's story in the novel was the sense of the unbeatable odds looming over Harry, the risks rising with each task until the climactic final battle.
Unfortunately, Newell and Kloves' fail to provide this sense of impending, inescapable doom. The scenes leading up to each task barely focus on Harry's fear of what he's about to face and touch only briefly on his efforts to prepare. Harry is at risk of being incinerated, shredded and devoured by dragons, but Newell and Kloves spend almost no time showing Harry trying to figure out how to take on a dragon. Instead, the scenes focus on Harry's pariah status with his classmates, Ron in particular. And while that's certainly troubling, surely, given the limited time, Newell and Kloves should have been building up the threat of the dragon. Instead, they waste time with substandard teen drama.
This happens again after the first task. The film should be dealing with Harry struggling to figure out what the next task is and what's in the lake. The film should be showing how overwhelmed and out of his depth Harry is. Instead, the focus is on the Yule Ball. What's especially annoying about this is that Ron and Hermione's issues surrounding the ball are confined between the first and second task. Their conflicts are never touched on again in the film. The result is an entire sequence of scenes that take place in a vacuum and have no relevance to the rest of the movie. They certainly has no bearing on the second task. And then, having wasted so much time, Newell and Kloves devote little attention to the time between the second and third task. This portion of the film focuses on the mysteries of Mr. Crouch, which are passed through hurriedly bafflingly. In one scene, Harry is fretting over Mr. Crouch's murderer and then suddenly he's getting ready to charge through a giant hedge maze.
And it's this meandering, disjointed, episodic film that leads up to Voldemort's return. In the movie, Voldemort's presence has been almost completely forgettable up to this point. In contrast, the book filled its pages with views of the damaged lives Voldemort had left in his wake. The film, however, restricts Voldemort's mention to a few brief scenes before his return. The result is that Voldemort's return seems to have almost nothing to do with anything that came before in this movie, and yet it's made the final action sequence. Once again, Newell and Kloves demonstrate an inability to create a sense of rising drama or to make their movie build to its climax. In the book, the Triwizard Tasks forced Harry into situations where he was outmatched, underpowered and overwhelmed, and the third and hardest is followed by the still-in-school Harry confronting the deadliest wizard in history. But the movie fails to up the stakes progressively. The result is that Harry versus Voldemort is simply the arbitrary conclusion at the end of some episodic misadventures.
Action sequences by themsleves aren't terribly interesting. If the film is going to revolve around Harry in action in the Triwizard Tournament, then the scenes around the action needed to establish what Harry's up against, how serious it is, and what it is he's fighting for. Goblet of Fire fails to do this, instead focusing on the social lives of teenagers, punctuated with some wizard spectator sports.
Populating this clumsy film are some of the worst performances the Harry Potter series has contained to this point, and this is a film series packed with child actors. Pedja Bjelac's Karkaroff is ridiculous with his perpetual bad-comedy sneer replacing any alternative facial expressions. Brendan Gleeson's Mad-Eye Moody is played so appallingly over the top it's impossible to take the character seriously, as he jerks pointlessly with every line of dialogue and growls every sentence, achieving no subtlety or believable menace. Roger Lloyd Pack's Mr. Crouch's pathetic persona is performed without any nuance or subtlety beyond a constantly pathetic smile, which is wince-inducing to watch. David Tennant's overexaggerated facial expressions rival Jim Carrey's. Emma Watson overenunciates every single word of every single line.
It's Albus Dumbledore who gets the worst deal in this movie. For the first two first two movies, poor Dumbledore was played as a wheezing old man who looked ready to drop dead. With the third movie, we finally had the mischievous, clever, subtle, whimsical, playful Dumbledore that had actually appeared in the books, possibly because the third movie was directed by a subtle, whimsical, playful director. But under Mike Newell's sledgehammer-subtle direction, Michael Gambon outdoes his fellow cast members for the worst performance in the entire film. Gambon has maybe four lines he doesn't bellow or growl out. He gesticulates madly with every line, and his eyes blaze with irritation and fury that never seem supported by the dialogue or the scene. It's like Mad-Eye Moody's dialogue was redistributed to Gambon and Dumbledore's actual lines were cut. With Newell behind the camera, our gentle, charismatic headmaster suddenly becomes a man who practically throttles Harry and throws him into walls when questioning him. The charismatic schoolteacher of the previous film seems to have vanished. Given how Dumbledore's role is largely observational, making the character angry and frustrated only makes him seem ineffective and incapable.
This is more damaging to the Harry Potter mythology than a casual viewing would suggest. Dumbledore, in the books, has always embodied the very best of the ideals in the Harry Potter universe. His fondness for childish pleasures like sweets and nonsense games, his patience and enthusiasm for life and his understanding gentleness with his students defined him as the perfect schoolteacher. At the same time, his awareness and remoteness marked him as a manipulator who would see evil vanquished even if it might cause our beloved characters harm, and his willingness to let children like the Trio engage in dangerous battles made the character clearly good but rather mysterious and unpredictable. Dumbledore is a mix of the best of humanity that Rowling can render, matched with immense, seemingly incalculable power. And to render him as a snarling, incapable figure deprives the Harry Potter mythos of its main spokesperson.
Newell doesn't stop there with besmirching the pillars of Harry Potter. While Columbus' approach to the friendship of the Trio was bland and Cuaron gave Hermione all the good lines, Newell does far worse. He renders Harry as a showboating celebrity, as Harry shouts joyously to the crowd while brandishing his Golden Egg, teasing them with opening it. This would be the same Harry Potter who dislikes his fame and assured Ron he didn't want eternal glory. Ron's sullen displeasure with Harry's notoriety is part of the book, but Newell has Ron inexplicably, incomprehensibly taking credit for Harry being warned about the dragons. In another appalling sequence of scenes, Harry laughs at Ron when Ron is sent frayed and out of fashion dress robes, and mocks Ron with Fred and George when Ron receives dancing instructions from McGonagall. The blatant pleasure Harry shows at his friend's discomfort is horrifically out of character; this is nothing like the easy friendship in Cuaron's movie where that joking comments were softened with familiarity and warmth. Even more jarring is to see Harry, Ron and Hermione amused and entertained when Fred and George engage in a fistfight. And the issues between Ron and Hermione are rendered in a few brief scenes of sniping, which instantly disappear and are never referred to again after the Yule Ball. The haphazard nature of the relationships here make the Trio's friendships almost incomprehensible.
And, finally, Newell caps off the film with an ending where Harry, Hermione and Ron are cheerful and upbeat despite the fact that a psychopath wizard with a legion of followers has been restored to physical existence and will surely come gunning for them. One would think we could get some scenes of the characters reacting to this new world they're living in; a hardy readiness for conflict to come, a promise of friendship and unity between the Trio. Instead, we get an all-smiles final scene that seems to be from another movie entirely.
Goblet of Fire is one of those movies where one simply finds ones self picking at minute details. Why is it necessary to constantly show Moody taking lengthy swigs from his flask; couldn't this have been shot in a more subtle fashion? Why does Moody, a shrewd and calculating impostor, fail to keep an adequate supply of Polyjuice Potion on hand in his final scene? Why does Dumbledore have such great difficulty understanding the purpose of entering Harry in the Triwizard Tournament? Why does the film spend so much time building up to a big Quidditch Match that it never intends to show? Why does the film focus on Harry's teen angst issues when the time would have been more profitably spent on the threats to Harry's life? Why are the Durmstrang and Beaubatons students divided into boys for Durmstrang and girls for Beaubatons? Why is Sirius Black in the film when he provides no useful information whatsoever? Why is Rita Skeeter in the film and made the focus of her own scene when her gossip column has no real impact on the rest of the film?
Why in God's name did the producers think a master of style like Alfonso Cuaron ought to be succeeded by a clumsy ham and egger like Mike Newell?
Patrick Doyle's musical score is excellent, but aside from that, Goblet of Fire is one of the worst movies I've ever seen.
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