Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets Review

The second film is where the first strategy runs out. Columbus repeats the shape of the opening picture almost beat for beat, adds half an hour, and produces the longest entry in the run attached to the thinnest story in it. The mystery is genuinely inert. Harry hears a voice, students are petrified, and the solution sits in a diary that delivers the whole plot as a speech in the final act, so the middle of the film is a holding pattern dressed as suspense.

What survives is the craft around it. The Burrow, the flying Ford Anglia and Kenneth Branagh's Lockhart make the most purely enjoyable stretch of early Potter, Branagh playing vanity so precisely that the cowardice lands as comedy rather than contempt. Dobby was a real technical leap for 2002 and remains an irritant by design that the film never learns to modulate.

Richard Harris, filming while gravely ill, gives Dumbledore a stillness the part would not have again. The basilisk finale is staged with menace in a chamber that visibly cost what it cost. But completeness is not storytelling, and by the third petrification you can feel the picture filling time until the diary talks.