Preview: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

Jul 14 2009 by David Whetstone, The Journal

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, which opens tomorrow, keeps David Whetstone on the edge of his seat

The Harry Potter saga as a literary phenomenon failed to sweep me along in its relentless takeover of the nation’s reading habits.

I never got beyond the first few pages of the very first in the series of JK Rowling’s seven novels, perhaps conscious of the fact that 10-year-olds (and my mother, a good few years older) had left me standing.

But I may now have to return to them for the sixth film of the sixth novel, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, is so darned good.

Aware that I was very Potter-light in my knowledge of the books – although I have seen a couple of the earlier cinema releases – I wondered if director David Yates’s film would bamboozle me with mystifying allusions and inexplicable plot twists.

If it did, I didn’t feel cheated, for I can’t remember the last time I enjoyed a preview screening quite so much.

The film carries a 12A certificate and I would suggest that it is not for those of a nervous disposition. It’s long, at two hours and 30 minutes, its hero and his friends are clearly old enough now for the Hogwarts sixth form and it is very dark, with one or two really scary moments.

Fans will know the whole story better than me but we catch up with Harry, Ron, Hermione and the others as they prepare to return to the wizardry school run by a gilt-edged cast of famous British character actors in fantastic fancy dress.

Harry, personified by the enduringly geeky Daniel Radcliffe, has just been chatted up by a girl in a greasy spoon cafe when he looks out of the window to see Michael Gambon dressed as Dumbledore. Uh-oh!

London’s Millennium Bridge has just been trashed by three speeding black wraiths so we know there’s mischief afoot.