Whose Wand was it Anyway?

As my previous Harry Potter reviews have explained, I’m not a raging Harry Potter fan (actually not much of a movie fan at all, but my wife makes me, so I’m sort of a reluctant critic, the most objective kind). Maybe my response is best described by the scene in the movie where the loyal defenders of Hogwarts gather and unite in resistance to the evil horde, draw their weapons, and what they raise over their heads in defiance is a fringe of silly little sticks. I nearly fell over laughing.

You have to be somebody who believes in more than the power of market license to make a kazoo wannabee into the convincing equivalent of a giant bug zapper. I have a hard time suspending disbelief enough for the handle of a back scratcher to be the moral equivalent of an assault rifle, even with an automatic flash.

As far as the plot goes, what would be the point? Hogwarts ain’t big enough for Voldemort and Potter. Somebody’s going down. Find the ancient chalice and cut off Voldemort's supply. Oh wait a minute, that's another movie, but the supernatural bank experience was kind of amusing. I see an amusement park ride in the future. No matter. Snapes comes clean. The Snitch of Dumbledore reveals its secret. A couple takes of emerging Hermione gratuitously leaning forward in her low-necked sorceress outfit, but that's as racy as you're going to get in Harry Potter. The acting is about what you would expect.

Speaking of wands, maybe the Potter fanatics out there can explain to me who owned the infernal wand of wands anyway. Early in the movie somebody says you have to kill the owner to really get control of the wand, but at the end that seems to have morphed into something like getting a grip on it. Harry didn’t kill Malfoy to get the wand, and I’m not real clear about where Malfoy got it, or why exactly he wasn’t able to contend for king of the world with it, but the ways of wizards are winsome and weird to us mere mortals. The wand, so it seems, has its own ideas about who or whom it serves, so maybe it justifies its own behavior, like an ATM machine, although wouldn't that would make merely breaking it in half and tossing it out in the yard a bit risky? Suppose it finds itself? After all, Frodo had to haul the ring off to some volcanic eruption in New Zealand to get rid of it. I guess wands just don’t have the durability and determination of rings. Maybe it’s a gender thing.

Never mind the wand. The first half of the movie was a successful action adventure , and the Hogwarts siege had a couple of nice effects. I would have been happy for Voldemort to have Hermione and consider my money well spent for that much, but of course the whole alpha male thing had to be resolved. I’m sorry, but I have a hard time even getting up any antagonism for Voldemort anymore. He’s been named so many times now that he’s got better image recognition than Martha Stewart. The idea of sharing something with Harry was promising, but the expression of it sort of evaporated like bubbles from a cauldron of lizard tails. The whole thing could have ended at the King’s Cross white-out and faded into a hazy glimpse of the future. I think it would have been really cool if the ending credits had run over the actors on the set saying goodbye to each other with a final shot of Radcliffe looking around at the set, laying down his wand on a table and walking out. And how about this? One of the stone statues in the hall is Rowling on a pedestal. At the very end, the statue comes to life, jumps down off the pedestal, picks up the sword and the wand, climbs back on the pedestal, and turns back to stone? Would that just break the spell, or would that send chills up your spine? What I fear most is that the whole franchise has moved irrevocably beyond either spells or fear into the morbid realm of the commercial, but maybe that’s where it really was from the beginning.

Here’s Thinking for You,
Iffy