Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

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And so we come to part four in the proposed septet of fantastical wizard flicks. Brit helmsman Mike Newell’s made a fine fist of Steven Kloves’ screenplay, injecting even more Angloisms into JK Rowling’s quintessentially British fantasy tale. If there’s a problem, it’s with the length of Rowling’s source material; it’s simply too long to fit into 160 minutes without having large chunks of storyline left on the cutting room floor. Consequently, those who haven’t read any of the Harry Potter books may find this latest episode particularly confusing: characters flit in and out without explanation and scenes change without warning (indeed, the first 100 pages or so – dealing with the Quidditch World Cup – are dispensed with in less than two minutes).As a spectacle, though, ‘Goblet’ is deliciously dark, wickedly funny and superbly mounted; it also sports some fine turns, especially Ralph Fiennes’ evil Lord Voldemort and Brendan Gleeson’s cockeyed wizard, Alastor Moody. Newell keeps the action centred on two key events from the book: the Hogwarts Yule Ball and the Triwizard Tournament (a distinctly dangerous trio of tasks involving stupendously rendered CGI dragons, scary mermaid-like octopuses called Grindylows, and an ominous maze). Along the way, loyalties are tested as Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) falls out of favour with his misguided chums, most notablyRupert Grint’s Ron Weasley (who’s grown into a strapping longhair who says ‘bloody hell’ a lot) and Emma Watson’s Hermione Granger (who’s pissed off because neither Harry nor Ron have asked her to the ball). The ten-year-olds I took along loved every minute of it, despite the creepy opening and violent climax. Stroll on number five, then.

Before the first Harry Potter film came out in 2001, many fans were worried that the eccentric and distinctively English charms of JK Rowling's books would be lost in the journey from printed page to multiplex screen.

These days, the novels are getting saggier and more bloated (at more than 750 pages in length, the last one was longer than Crime and Punishment), but ever since Christopher (Home Alone) Columbus vacated the director's seat, the film adaptations have been getting progressively sharper and more interesting. The latest even features Jarvis Cocker and members of Radiohead vamping it up as the Wyrd Sisters at a school ball.

The Goblet of Fire is also the first Harry Potter film to be directed by an Englishman, Mike Newell, best known for Four Weddings and a Funeral and Donnie Brasco. Like his predecessor Alfonso Cuarón, he has little time for anything sappy or sugary. "Dark and difficult times lie ahead" is one of the things that Hogwarts headmaster Dumbledore (Michael Gambon) tells Harry early on; and the whole film, an unexpectedly black and at times very frightening foray into the less fun side of wizardry and magic, fully deserves its "12A" classification.

The characters are less goody-two-shoes than before, too. Daniel Radcliffe, as Harry, used to look like a New Labour policy wonk or the op-ed editor of a liberal broadsheet; these days he's more tetchy and solitary. That's as nothing compared to the changes in Ron Weasley's personality. The former freckled bumpkin (Rupert Grint) seems to have developed Tourette's. He can't stop yowling "Bloody hell", spends half his time cussing and muttering about Harry, whom he is beginning to envy. He also now sports a lank fringe of the kind worn by guitarists of struggling Thames Valley shoe-gazing bands.

In this film, hormones and testosterone levels are racing faster than any of the alchemical concoctions brewed up by Professor Snape (Alan Rickman). Harry finds himself flexing his burgeoning masculinity in a Triwizard tournament against the strapping Euro Quidditch champ Viktor Krum (Stanislav Ianevski) as well as Hogwarts' Most Wanted golden boy Cedric Diggory (Robert Pattinson).

At the same time, he has to pluck up the courage to ask Sino-Scot beauty Cho Chang (Katie Leung) to escort him to the annual Yule Ball. Hermione (Emma Watson), meanwhile, takes her nose out of magic books long enough to doll herself up in make-up and ball gown land to such lovely effect that she even takes Ron's breath away.

These growing pains and Prom Night scenes nod to the last 20 years of American teen movies more than they do to the English public-school literary tradition in which Rowling's books are steeped. Other scenes, including those in which peroxide-blonde showbiz journalist Rita Skeeter (Miranda Richardson) invents sensational accounts of Harry's pre-tournament nerves ("Hey! My eyes aren't 'glistening with the ghosts of my past!' " he objects), owe more to Sweet Smell of Success than Tom Brown's Schooldays.

But where Newell really scores is in taking a leaf out of Peter Jackson's book and cranking up the fear factor. There are scenes, particularly those starring Ralph Fiennes as the cadaverous Lord Voldemort making a devilish return to the fray, that play as yucky hybrids of the scariest moments in Lord of the Rings and the Garden of Gethsemane episode in The Passion of the Christ.

Even the hearty wizard-athletics at the Department of International Magical Cooperation tournament take a turn for the grotesque when Harry finds himself being lashed at and singed by a fire-breathing dragon and when, still wearing his trusty specs, he wades and flippers through the depths of a muddy green lake at the bottom of which he finds his friends fastened and nearly petrified.

Best and most beastly of all is the sterling performance by Brendan Gleeson as mad-eyed Professor Moody, Hogwarts's Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher. He gruffs, swigs from small flasks of booze in order to insulate himself from demons, and takes Harry under his wing, a place that turns out to be less safe than the schoolboy imagines. For much of the film it seems that he's going to be another Hagrid - a growler who turns out to be a softie - but when the secret of his identity does emerge, it's more sordid than most audiences new to the story will expect.

That in the end is the true measure of The Goblet of Fire. For all its dull moments - and, at more than 150 minutes, there are quite a few stretches when it feels as we're merely biding time until another ugly episode - it isn't the kind of film that will appeal only to fans of the book. Of course, it should have featured a lot more of the deliciously serpentine Alan Rickman, and it should certainly have given much more screen time to Jarvis Cocker; he is, after all, the patron saint of exactly the same kind of misfits, outsiders and misshapes represented by Potter himself.

But it's rare that one is able to herald the fourth picture of a franchise series as the best to date. The Goblet of Fire is saturated, to positive ends, in greater sorrow and greater depth than any of the Columbus- or Cuarón-directed films. One hopes that Rowling's next novel is half as good, and as relatively concise, as Mike Newell's brand-revitalising current triumph.

In seinem vierten Schuljahr an der Schule für Zauberei wird der nunmehr 14-jährige Harry Potter mit der Teilnahme an einem magischen Turnier und drei lebensgefährlichen Aufgaben konfrontiert, ohne zu ahnen, dass dahinter eine Intrige steckt, die ihn seinem ärgsten Widersacher ausliefert, dem wieder zu körperlicher Gestalt gelangten Lord Voldemort. Furioser Fantasy- und Abenteuerfilm vor düsterer Kulisse, strukturiert als nahezu ununterbrochene Folge tricktechnisch spektakulärer, visuell durchaus eindrucksvoller Ereignisse. Stillere und poetische Momente werden dabei ebenso zurückgedrängt wie die im Roman vorhandene, für die jugendliche Zielgruppe relevante Auseinandersetzung mit Themen wie Freundschaft und Solidarität, Zivilcourage und Loyalität.