| RATING: | 40% |
| FORMAT: | DVD |
More solipsistic narcissism from the pen of a writer who can only refer-in-passing to the ethical issues (belonging & cultural intolerance) that she resolutely refuses to deal with dramatically. The moral level here is that of a child - like the characters about whom she writes.
Not the morality tale it pretends to be but a narrative of political correctness which, for the amoral, is a vapid substitute - a poor man’s ethics. Escapism is fundamentally immoral because the characters, the author and the audience are all complicit in running away from the real-life maturity-challenges raised by this story.
Supposedly anti-bigotry, this movie is trapped in middle-class Whiteness and the belief that if everyone does what Whites tell them to do, then everything will be all right. Yet this creates the very problem that such little-Hitlerism is purportedly-designed to alleviate.
The set design focuses on the old-fashioned; stressing the film’s desire for nostalgia-for-its-own-sake, not the expressed wish for a culturally-integrated future. Its integrationist model is just another from of intolerance.
Ultimately, magic is posited as the orphan’s revenge on a cruel, heartless culture - a world that, in fact, only appears to be so depending on how you choose to look at it. The wizardry school the younger characters attend is really nothing more than an orphanage for social misfits who can find nothing much worthwhile to do with their special powers - unlike the denizens of, say, the Marvel Comics’ universe.
The grim mediocrity of this film series fascinates - as each installment gets longer than the last and, yet, we get no further forward in understanding the characters and their real-world motivations in a puerile fantasy that bears little emotional relationship to lived experience. The SFX are the tail-wagging-the-dog in a teen soap opera that lacks both real imagination and dramatic bite. Add to that the fact that the performers are not precociously-believable and you have a formula box-office success in the absence of anything better in competition. This movie, like its predecessors, lowers the bar rather than raising it with great visuals pointlessly used to ultimately nullifying effect
The younger performers are non-charismatic and the older ones cannot save the day since they are not the focus of the plotting and, anyway, lack the screen time to fully engage our emotions. This is storytelling by numbers and the filmmakers could do worse than revisit a masterpiece like the Wizard of Oz to get a fresh idea of how it could be done better.
Turgid cinematic torture, unrelieved by any worthwhile belly laughs.
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