Love it? Hate it? There’s little consensus about Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1, as early reviews both praise and attack the film.
The seventh Harry Potter film, which premiered last night in Leicester Square, is much darker than previous ones, with Harry, Ron and Hermoine leaving Hogwarts to conquer Voldemort.
The Guardian’s Xan Brooks gave it two out of five stars, and called it a “a prolonged death rattle”, ridiculing the entire series.
“It’s hard to mourn the demise of a franchise that was never more than half-alive to begin with,” he writes.
The Telegraph’s review was much more favourable, giving it four stars and saying it was the “scariest Potter film so far.”
“This is also the instalment that takes us deepest into the emotions of the central trio,” says reviewer Anita Singh.
The Daily Mail’s Chris Tookey gave the Deathly Hallows three stars and said that “the storytelling isn’t all that clear” but that the film was touching and lyrical.
“The most memorable sequences in the film are not, for once, the action scenes but the acting ones,” he said praising the acting of Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint who play Harry, Hermoine and Ron.
The Sun gave high praise for the film saying that director David Yates has created “the most confident, stylish, individual, warm-hearted and witty Harry Potter yet.”
Kate Muir of The Times gave it three out of five stars and said that the film lacked forward momentum and that many will wish that the “bloated finale” could be cut down to a “zappy film”.
Pick up Monday’s issue of TNT to see what our critic thought.
