Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows - Part 1

Movies that don't have endings are a ripoff. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Part One, aka Harry Potter 7a, has no ending. It just cuts off, like it's commercial time and you're about to see ads for the kind of Christmas crap you're supposed to buy for the people you don't know, don't want to know, and don't want to ask what they like. Like Snuggies, shaving kits, golf towels, low-quality jewelry and sweaters with cute animals on them. Then, the movie will come back on and show us the proper ending. Harry Potter doesn't come back. So instead of having commercials, it is one, for the next flick.

I understand this is the first half of two parts, but that's a lousy fucking excuse to just cut the shit off mid-story. It means the fuckers that made it assume we're all coming back next year to pony up for the second half. No moviemaker should ever assume that. Every movie should be entertaining and complete on its own. Sure, it can be part of a larger story, but the grassfuckers should at least give it an ending that lets it standalone for that one kid who only has enough money in his life for one movie, and he chose to spend it on this one. To leave that kid hanging is to tell him, "Fuck you, pal. Go rob a bank if you want satisfaction." They shouldn't assume we're all coming back. They're screwing the fans who will die in car crashes between now and next year, the ones who will be murdered, commit suicide, get hit with giant boulders and become comatose, and those that will get strung out on meth and no longer have interest in or money for movies. In other words, most everyone I know.

Any movie that's two-and-a-half hours long has to have a proper ending. I can't go 150 minutes of anything without some kind of payoff. This isn't tantric sex. Hell, it's not even Candy Bottom's porn remake of Shoah. Harry Potter 7a is a big-ass budget, Hollywood movie operating largely on the Hollywood formula. Except it just cuts off. I know the Harry Potter books have endings. They tell a larger story, but they each manage to end. Prior to this cum-guzzler of a flick, Warner Brothers managed to compact each book into a single movie.

I guess, though, that they now see the tail end of this cash cow heading into the charnel house, and they want to get as much meat out of it as they can. Stretch it out, make it last. Harry Potter 7a is the hot dog of Potter flicks.

Daniel Radcliffe soldiers on as Harry Potter. Rupert Grint bravely grows up to be an unattractive young man in the role of Ron Weasley, and Emma Watson is the pointy-chinned, smartest of the lot Hermione Granger. They're still wizards, only they no longer go to Hogwarts boarding school, but begin the story in terror that the evil Lord Voldemort (Ralphie Fiennes) plans to use all his powers and his army of death-eaters to kill this Potter kid. See, Potter is now firmly established as the only hope for goodness to conquer evil.

The story then revolves around Radcliffe trying to collect artifacts that, if they fall into Fiennes hands, will make the villain invincible. Then everyone will be screwed. Like if John Boehner got the plans and parts to make his own tanning machine. Radcliffe, Grint and Watson go on camping trips, have close calls and solve puzzles to figure out where the artifacts are and how to destroy them. Except they don't get far in their quest in this movie. They destroy one. They destroyed two others earlier. They have four more to smash up in the last movie, Harry Potter 7b. Plus now they also have to also collect three new items called the Deathly Hallows before Fiennes gets them, because with them he will be the master of death. Let's see, one out of five are captured in 7a, so the other four plus three new artifacts to be gotten in 7b. Nice pacing, you idiots.

Harry Potter 7a looks fine. It's expensive and the director understands the trick of making the magic a part of the world in which it takes place, not the focal point. The special effects are very god, except for the elves and goblins. They look fucking lame. The main characters are teenagers, so it's expected that they be moody little shits who whine like the power steering belt on a Ford Windstar. The settings and the production values are pretty fucking great. Alan Rickman returns as the sneering Professor Snape, which is always welcome to me.

The problem with Harry Potter 7a is that it takes so fucking long to go halfway. There ain't enough story in this flick to justify its epic tone and length, or its sweeping score. It's like someone forgot to make the movie fun and just canonized it instead. It spends a lot of time in a tent with the three teenagers puzzling out details. There are long windswept shots of probably every square inch of wilderness in England. There's a greatest hits of good guys and bad guys in the Potter world making cameos. Not enough Rickman, but the movie also has Helena Bonham Carter as Bellatrix Lestrange, Bill Nighy as Rufus Scrimgeour, Timothy Spall as Wormtail, and on and on. Some of the characters have a purpose, and some don't. It's sort of like Cannonball Run 2 in that sense, only longer, and with fewer cars.

There isn't much action, as you'd expect when you leave 88% of it for another movie. The makers don't have much going on for 150 minutes. Everything interesting that happens here could have been done in an hour or less. Like my sex life: why the fuck would I spend a half hour when I can be finished in five minutes? And I get a real ending, too, packed with emotion and regret, that leaves me tired and hollow for an hour.

Harry Potter 7a looks expensive and feels cheap. It's lips and assholes. Maybe the people who made it convinced themselves they needed two parts, that they could make their artistic statement with a bigger canvas, or some such shit. They were wrong. This wasn't the place to do it. They made an unfun movie and left that poor, poor child who could afford only one movie in his life fucked up the ass. Two Fingers.