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Now Reading: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2-Disc Widescreen Edition) (2004)
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Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2-Disc Widescreen Edition) (2004)
how the heck can you hate this movie!!!
While still nowhere near as good as the books, Prisoner of Azkaban fared the best of the first 3 Potter books in its transition to the silver screen. It had some problems, but overall, it was enjoyable.
First, the good stuff: David Thewlis was perfect as Professor Lupin. His down-on-his-luck, yet noble portrayal, with just the right air of mystery, worked beautifully, the equal of the always good Alan Rickman as Snape. Michael Gambon was also a big improvement over Richard Harris as Dumbledore, and Emma Thompson clearly had fun as the daffy Professor Trelawney.
The kids were generally well done in the way they were shown transitioning through adolescence here, and the gist of the plot - the hunt for escaped convict Sirius Black - held the right air of menace. The special fx were decent if not great. (The dementors, for example, were scary, but couldn't help but bring to mind, and suffer in comparison with, the ring wraiths from Lord of the Rings.)
Moreover, what all too many reviewers fail to understand is that a book and a movie are different media for telling a story. I expect a film adaptation of a book to capture the spirit of the book, not necessarily to regurgitate every plot point and line of dialogue verbatim. The first two Potter movies faithfully repeated many (not all) of the stuff from the books, but it was stuff seemingly chosen at random. The result was that those movies felt disjointed, incoherant, and not at all like Harry Potter.
Prisoner at least tries to be its own film, and as a result, it stays truer to the source, and ends up being a much better story.
But there was some bad stuff: Draco Malfoy grew even more ludicrous, he was so pathetically whiny that it was hard to see him as threatening in any way. (In fairness, that's a problem that's growing in the books, too.) The actor who played Wormtail was just off - rather than craven, he came off as weaselly and silly. The complex plot of the book was hard to get across, and the movie only partly succeeds. There are definitely holes that will leave you scratching your head if you haven't read the books.
The true HP fanatic will probably want to buy this movie, especially to tide you over until book 6 this summer.
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