BY MILA PANTOVICH
PRIDE STAFF WRITER

“Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1” is well-paced and will keep you mostly interested and engaged for the 146 minutes of its entirety. Maybe the reason why it is so engaging is because the entire film functions as a great big tease. You wait over two hours for a payoff, enjoying the ride that teasing generally brings, but are ultimately cut short by the credits, receiving no relief. You also may want to refresh your memory on what happened in the last couple films but once you remember, the movie continues on a straight path, leading up to the film’s end that will having you sighing over the eight month wait for the climax promised in the final installment, released in July in 3D.
Without Hogwarts to protect him, Harry (Daniel Radcliffe), with the help from Hermione (Emma Watson) and Ron (Rupert Grint), is on the run from the various bad guys who are hunting him on behalf of Lord Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes), who takes lessons of tyranny from Hitler with his own style of racial cleansing. Predictably, love triangle drama threatens to break the three friends up as they are stranded in the woods, searching for the four Horcruxes (pieces of Voldemort’s soul, remember?). With the film dragging in the middle, it absolutely soars in an animated sequence illustrating the origins of the Deathly Hallows, waking you instantly from the monotony of the film’s middle. Also of note is an all too brief dance scene between Harry and Hermione to Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ “O, Children,” which is fascinating in its awkwardly sweet placement.
The film briefly pulls in some new faces (Bill Nighy, Rhys Ifans, and John Hurt), giving the film more artistic credibility, but never uses the actors’ full talent (Hurt is only near the end and barely noticed as background). The film also fails to take advantage of some of the other original characters; Severus Snape (Alan Rickman) and the Aryan Draco Malfoy (Tom Felton) are merely onscreen for the sake of being onscreen. Their characters aren’t used to their full extent, putting their usually sinister doings on hold for the sake of their forced appearances.
However, there are saving graces. Rupert Grint, clearly no longer a child, shines as the jealous Ron and little Dobby the elf makes his return in a chorus of “awwwws” and you can’t help but join in. James Andrew Eric Phelps and Oliver Martyn John Phelps are comedic scene stealers as the twins, Fred and George Weasley, Ron’s brothers. Finally, there’s Ralph Fiennes as Voldemort. Fiennes, looking like the illicit lovechild of Nosferatu and a vampire bat with an eerie sweetness that reminds one of Martha Stewart on a bender, delivers a sickly disturbing onscreen presence that has you longing to see his fascinating face in every single frame.
Was it truly necessary to break the final film up into two parts? Probably not. Much of Part I consists of the three friends bouncing from place to place, looking to be in a real dire hurry, without discovering much of anything to make it worth their, and our, while. However, the real test will be the final film (in which Gary Oldman makes a long-awaited return as Sirius Black). With six previous films and 146 minutes of drawn-out teasing in Part 1, the payoff better be worth it.