![]() Harry starts hearing a malevolent voice of unknown origin urging him to kill, and a pet cat is found hanging in a hallway. Aptly, Harry, Ron and Hermione seem more truly and enthusiastically like best friends and co-conspirators this time around a little self-consciousness is evident, and the young leading thesps indulge in moments of spontaneity that reassuringly suggest they now feel more at home in their roles.Īlthough Hogwarts is still dominated by the same figures –headmaster Albus Dumbledore (Richard Harris), Professor McGonagall (Maggie Smith), Professor Snape (Alan Rickman) and Hagrid the Giant (Robbie Coltrane) - and classes begin promisingly with Lockhart and the new professor of Herbology, Sprout (Miriam Margolyes), who performs a particularly amusing demonstration of the proper method of topping mandrakes, all is not well. Mysteriously prevented from passing through the barrier to platform nine and three-quarters at King’s Cross station, Harry and his best friend, Ron Weasley (Rupert Grint), are forced to travel by car - Ron’s dad’s flying Ford Anglia, to be specific - which lands the boys safely on the school grounds, but none too smoothly in the mighty branches of an ancient tree that takes great offense at the intrusion.Īlthough Harry’s voice has dropped an octave or so since the first year, he’s not really a teenager yet all the same, there is a new ardor in his excitement over reuniting with Hermione (Emma Watson), the top student in their class. ![]() Also entering the stage for the first time is Lucius Malfoy (Jason Isaacs), the blond-tressed, evil-oozing father of Harry’s school archrival, Draco. The preening author of the autobiography “Magical Me,” Lockhart is joining the Hogwarts faculty as teacher of Defense Against the Dark Arts. Happily, a good part of the buildup is spent back at Diagon Alley, where Harry first encounters Gilderoy Lockhart (Kenneth Branagh, so ideally cast you’d think Rowling wrote the character with him in mind). So it’s only a matter of about 20 minutes until Harry (Daniel Radcliffe), who has endured a dispiriting summer as a virtual prisoner at the suburban home of his dreadfully conventional uncle and aunt, is off again to Hogwarts to resume his study of witchcraft and wizardry. Rowling assumed a certain reader knowledge in her second book (published in 1999), so do returning director Chris Columbus and screenwriter Steve Kloves rightly presume to pare exposition down to the minimum this time out (it’s hard to imagine anyone seeing this who hasn’t caught the original). But its mammoth success remains a foregone conclusion. With Pottermania perhaps having cooled over the course of a year from the heat level of a burning furnace to that of a happily bubbling cauldron, it can’t be expected that “Chamber of Secrets” will hit the dizzying commercial heights of “Sorcerer’s Stone,” which at $967 million total gross ($317.6 million from the U.S.) stands as the No. ![]() Darker and more dramatic, this account of Harry’s troubled second year at Hogwarts may be a bit overlong and unmodulated in pacing, but it possesses a confidence and intermittent flair that begin to give it a life of its own apart of the literary franchise, something the initial picture never achieved. Draco reveals to them that he is not the Heir of Slytherin, but that he wishes he knew who it was so that he could help them attack Muggle-borns, again showing his deep hatred and prejudice.While “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets” may slavishly adhere to its source novel nearly as much as its predecessor did, it is on every count a better movie than last year’s first film installment in the telling of the story of a young wizard’s startling education. This prejudice leads Harry, Ron, and Hermione to believe that Draco is the Heir of Slytherin and that he is the one causing the attacks, and so they conjure up a potion to turn Harry and Ron into Crabbe and Goyle in order to ask Draco about the Chamber of Secrets. He also despises Harry and often taunts him when other people treat him like a celebrity. He makes fun of Ron for being poor and calls Hermione a “Mudblood,” a slur implying that she’s inferior because she has two Muggle parents. Draco constantly uses hateful words to discriminate against others who are not like him. Draco and his father Lucius become in many ways the antithesis of the Weasley family and Harry. Draco can usually be seen flanked by his two friends Crabbe and Goyle. A second-year student in Slytherin and Harry’s rival at Hogwarts.
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