The Pecan Park Eagle

Monday night is “seniors night” at Memorial City Mall Cinemark so my wife Norma and I, plus our grown son Neal, went to see “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” as our weekly family evening out. We’ve seen all the previous Potter flicks, but none of us have ever read any of the J.K. Rowling books about this band of young British magic people. As the probable result of that shortfall on background, I always end up going to the newest Potter movie long on memories of people flying on broomsticks, but very short on recollections of what it is they are trying to accomplish. Usually I end up walking away from each new Potter movie vowing never to see another because … because why? …. because I either never quite get or care about what I just saw on the screen.  The Half-Blood Prince proved no exception.

In short. here’s what I think the movie was about:

Now a young man, the movie starts with Harry Potter about to score a pick up on a cute young waitress at a late night grill in damp old London town. All of a sudden, Harry’s old mentor at the magic school, Professor Dumblebunny, shows up and literally whisks Harry away to go see another old dementia-case dude who once taught at the magic school. Dumblebunny talks “old dude” into returning to the magic school, but he’s really trying to find out what the guy lied about that made him go away in the first place. In some unclear way, Dumblebunny expects Harry to help uncover the secret and the latter is forced to return early to the magic school where old dude will again teach.

Old dude’s secret has something to do with another male  student from much earlier (and that fact alone always makes you wonder!). Through flashbacks, we learn that the earlier student had some special dark and evil powers and a depressed mood that didn’t exactly fast track him as a future good guy, but we still don’t know his identity.

Once he’s reunited with his friends at school (Emma and the redheaded guy), Harry and his pals go through some of the usual teenage/young adult angst over relationships, they experience serious conflct with a violent blonde-headed male student, and they do a a lot of flying around on broomsticks for the sake of playing a game that resembles airborne soccer or hockey.

I never did get what the secret was, but Potter and Dumblebunny keep finding a lot of new clues in little pools of steaming liquid that is apparently powerful enough to produce video flashbacks of what has happened in the past. It’s just that the people in these flashbacks speak British-English in low voice tones – making it impossible for people like me to get what they are revealing – even with my hearing aid turned all the way up!

Dumblebunny and the Potter trio get lost in a big cave while searching for something (the truth, I presume) – and Harry is pulled into a deep underground pond of water that is inhabited by hundreds of swimming, grabbing zombie people. Dumblebunny rescues Harry, but the whole bunch is soon confronted again back at the top of the school by all the bad guys, including the blonde kid and that creepy professor with the long black hair that’s in all the Potter shows.

The creepy black-haired prof then kills Professor Dumblebunny and reveals that he, indeed, was the half-blood prince all the time, a bit of news that fell upon me and my going-numb backside with all the energy evoked by a very loud sigh of “so what???”

I left the theatre with the same resolution to never again see another Harry Potter movie. Maybe if I had read all the books by the time I was age ten I’d feel differently, but some things are hard to recapture in the land of the long tooth.