Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009)
★★ — Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009)
Of all eight Harry Potter films, The Half-Blood Prince might just be the dullest. That's not a charge I take lightly against a franchise I've grown up with, but sitting through this one again, I found myself checking the clock in a way I haven't since the slower passages of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. And I didn't enjoy doing it.
The premise has genuine promise. Harry assisting Dumbledore in sifting through recovered memories, piecing together the history of how Voldemort became what he is, sounds exactly like the kind of detective work that could make for a gripping, layered film. There's mythology to excavate, dread to build, and a ticking clock underneath it all. In the book, it works. On screen, it's buried. What you get instead is a series of gloomy vignettes strung loosely together, with little momentum connecting them and even fewer stakes keeping you invested. Long stretches pass where nothing of consequence happens. It doesn't breathe so much as it idles.
Then there's the cinematography, and I have to be honest: it nearly broke me. Yes, I understand the intention. The world is getting darker. The palette should reflect that. I'm not asking for the warm, amber glow of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004), which balanced its shadows beautifully. But there's a difference between moody and simply unlit, and this film doesn't know where that line is. Whole scenes are swallowed by darkness, lit by nothing more than a flicker of candlelight or some ambient murk that tells you practically nothing about the space or the people in it. It genuinely looks, at times, as though the entire thing was shot through a black bin bag. You can forgive a slow film. You can't as easily forgive one that's also a chore to physically watch.
The teenage romance subplot compounds the problem. Harry and Ginny, Ron and Hermione, all fumbling towards each other in ways that feel awkward and, more damagingly, irrelevant. It pads out a film that's already struggling to justify its runtime, and none of it earns the emotional weight it seems to think it deserves. It's filler dressed up as character development.
And then there's the reveal. The half-blood prince of the title turns out to be someone so ill-suited to the dramatic weight the title implies that when the moment arrives, it feels less like a satisfying twist and more like a con. The film has been dangling this mystery, and the payoff lands with a thud. Alan Rickman, to his eternal credit, carries himself through it with more dignity than the scene warrants. He always gave this role something real. But even he can't rescue a final act that drifts to its conclusion without any real jolt of emotion or consequence. The attack on Hogwarts, the confrontation on the cliff, the death of one of the series' most important figures: all of it handled with a flatness that should feel shocking in retrospect.
I came away feeling like the film was so consumed with setting a tone that it forgot to tell a story. Ambitious in atmosphere, perhaps. But ambition without execution is just posturing. Going into Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1, I wanted to feel the weight of everything building. Instead I felt vaguely relieved it was over.
Two stars. The series survives it, but only just.
Rating: ★★ | Year: 2009 | Watched: 2025-07-27
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
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Related on Movies With Macca
More from David Yates: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 (2011) · Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 (2010) · Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2007)
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