Before you press play
Watch if
You have any affection for the wizarding world. And if you love the books and resent what the films did to them, come and hate-watch it, because the film-making is strong enough to argue with.
Wait if
You have a standing rule against adaptations of books you love, or against this kind of fantasy generally. This will not change your mind.
The second Harry Potter film is the one people call bloated, and it justifies every one of its 161 minutes. The creature work still convinces, the comedy is sharper than its reputation, and the castle has stopped explaining itself and started behaving like somewhere people live. The faults are small, and most of them sit in the mystery.
Where Chamber of Secrets picks up from the first film
Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone had to introduce a school. This one arrives with that job done and spends the surplus on texture: a flying Ford Anglia, a tree that fights back, a greenhouse of screaming plants, a swarm of pixies that takes a classroom apart.
Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe) is warned by a house-elf called Dobby (voiced by Toby Jones) that going back will put him in danger. He goes back. Within weeks there is a message daubed on a corridor wall, students are turning up petrified, and most of the school has decided he is doing it.
What the attacks in Chamber of Secrets are about
The students being attacked are Muggle-born. The film is clearer about that prejudice than it is about its own mystery. Draco Malfoy (Tom Felton) calls Hermione Granger (Emma Watson) a Mudblood on the Quidditch pitch, and the scene afterwards divides the explanation among three people. Hermione Granger defines the word, because it was aimed at her. Rubeus Hagrid (Robbie Coltrane) explains the thinking behind it and calls that thinking codswallop.
Not one of the three is a teacher doing anything about it.
Is Chamber of Secrets too long?
At 161 minutes this is the longest film in the series, and the charge that follows it around is bloat. The runtime is doing more work than that. This story has to build a thousand years of history behind the castle, run a string of attacks, not one, and give three children time to piece them together.
Ginny Weasley (Bonnie Wright) cannot be dragged into a chamber nobody has heard of, and one petrified student is an incident, not a siege. The middle hour is what makes the last half hour mean anything.
Which leaves a better complaint than bloat. The film cuts plenty, and Nearly Headless Nick's deathday party goes without being missed. What went with it was the one line explaining how Gilderoy Lockhart came to be teaching here at all.
Rupert Grint, Kenneth Branagh and the rest of the cast
The standing complaint about these films is that they flattened Ron Weasley (Rupert Grint) into comic relief. This one makes that harder to hold, because Rupert Grint keeps turning the comedy into character. He plays it into other people's faces and not out to the audience, whether he is telling Severus Snape (Alan Rickman) that the Whomping Willow did more damage to them than the other way round, or sitting through a Howler from his mother in front of the entire Great Hall.
The Howler is a joke and also the scene that shows you his family and his humiliation in the same beat. His wand snaps in the first act and keeps paying out to the end of the picture, comic and otherwise.
Gilderoy Lockhart (Kenneth Branagh) is the other engine, and the joke survives even as the story darkens. Kenneth Branagh plays him as a man who has fully believed his own publicity, so every scene he walks into arrives with the punchline already loaded.
The film never accounts for him, though. He cannot control a cage of pixies in front of second-years, and nobody in the castle ever asks how he got the job. They may have had no other applicant. Nobody checks.
Judging the three leads against adult performers like Alan Rickman and Maggie Smith is the wrong test. They are children, and the film needs them to behave like children. On those terms all three are good, and Daniel Radcliffe gets sold short most often, because Harry Potter's reserve suits a boy raised in a cupboard and Daniel Radcliffe never reaches for a spark the character has no reason to have.
The creature work, the score and how frightening it is
The effects have aged unevenly and it is worth saying which half. The climactic creature still reads as a real threat, helped by how little of it the film shows. Dobby is the half that dates, remarkable in 2002 and now plainly a digital character standing beside a real boy.
The sequel is also a good deal more frightening than the first film. The corridors, the voice in the walls and the spiders reach further into horror than Philosopher's Stone attempted, though the effect stays atmospheric, not graphic.
Chris Columbus directs it without fuss, and John Williams's score, adapted and conducted by William Ross, does the quiet work of making the castle feel inhabited.
A 4, and BLAZING. The script is the loose part: a teacher nobody checks, a villain with no room to become one, a house-elf whose reasons arrive long after his actions. None of it costs the film much, because what surrounds it is three leads visibly becoming friends instead of being told they are, and comedy doing character work, not filling space. Two decades on, it still plays.
Who opened the Chamber. Ginny Weasley (Bonnie Wright) did, without knowing it. Lucius Malfoy (Jason Isaacs) slipped an old diary into her books at Flourish and Blotts, and the memory of Tom Riddle (Christian Coulson) inside it took her over, getting stronger as she got weaker. Rubeus Hagrid (Robbie Coltrane) is blamed because Riddle framed him the first time the Chamber opened, fifty years earlier, and Riddle chose the memory he shows Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe) to make Harry believe it.
Dobby. Dobby (Toby Jones, voice) explains himself in the hospital wing, long after he sealed the barrier at King's Cross and sent a Bludger after Harry, and the film plays the explanation for laughs while he beats himself with a bottle. So people leave thinking it was never explained. The information is there. What the staging buries is a character defying the family that owns him with almost nothing to defy them with, and that gives the sock its weight at the end: Harry hands Lucius the ruined diary with a sock inside, Lucius passes it to Dobby without looking, and Dobby is free.
Dumbledore. His power is never demonstrated, it is subtracted, and the subtraction is the demonstration. Lucius has the governors suspend Albus Dumbledore (Richard Harris), Hagrid warns that the Muggle-born students will not stand a chance without him, and Ginny is taken not long after. What Dumbledore leaves behind is a line about help always being given at Hogwarts to those who ask for it. In the Chamber the help arrives as Fawkes, carrying the Sorting Hat with the Sword of Gryffindor inside it.
The basilisk. The best structural idea in the film is that you barely see it. Its stare kills, so everyone it attacks this year survives by seeing it second-hand: Colin Creevey (Hugh Mitchell) through a camera, Justin Finch-Fletchley (Edward Randell) through Nearly Headless Nick (John Cleese), Hermione Granger (Emma Watson) through a mirror. The threat holds because the film keeps refusing to show you the thing. When it finally does, Harry kills it with the sword, drives one of its broken fangs into the diary to end Riddle and wake Ginny, and Fawkes's tears heal the bite.
Ron and the spiders. The film's bravest act belongs to the comic character, and it costs him something nobody else is being asked to pay. Ron Weasley (Rupert Grint) is terrified of spiders. He follows them into the forest anyway, Aragog (Julian Glover, voice) tells the boys that Hagrid never opened the Chamber, and the joke Ron makes afterwards about killing Hagrid is funny because he paid for it.
Lucius's reasons, in the novels. The film never says why Lucius planted the diary. In the novel Half-Blood Prince (chapter 23), Dumbledore explains that he did it to discredit Arthur Weasley (Mark Williams) and to get rid of a highly incriminating object in one move. Voldemort had told him the diary would reopen the Chamber. Had Lucius known it held part of Voldemort's soul, he would have treated it with more reverence: he threw away a piece of his master over a feud with Arthur.
Bright Bulbs
- Neville Longbottom (Matthew Lewis) faints during the Mandrake lesson and Professor Sprout (Miriam Margolyes) simply carries on, which is the film's driest joke.
- Hermione Granger (Emma Watson) freezes a classroom of loose pixies with one charm after the teacher has fled, without the film stopping to congratulate her for it.
Dull Bulbs
- Lucius Malfoy (Jason Isaacs) is positioned as a second villain and given too little screen time to become one, so he stays a presence at the edges.
- Dobby (voiced by Toby Jones) drives the opening and then vanishes until the hospital wing, which leaves the first act feeling like a different film.
Cast
- Daniel Radcliffe as Harry Potter
- Rupert Grint as Ron Weasley
- Emma Watson as Hermione Granger
- Kenneth Branagh as Gilderoy Lockhart
- Alan Rickman as Severus Snape
- Maggie Smith as Minerva McGonagall
- Richard Harris as Albus Dumbledore
- Robbie Coltrane as Rubeus Hagrid
- Jason Isaacs as Lucius Malfoy
- Tom Felton as Draco Malfoy
- Matthew Lewis as Neville Longbottom
- Bonnie Wright as Ginny Weasley
- Toby Jones as Dobby
- Miriam Margolyes as Pomona Sprout
- John Cleese as Nearly Headless Nick
- Hugh Mitchell as Colin Creevey
- Edward Randell as Justin Finch-Fletchley
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