It used to be said that you know you’re getting old when policemen start to look younger. These days, you know you’re getting old when the cast of Harry Potter start looking older. This is their fifth film together. One look at the muscular Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) and you can see his boyhood has vanished and the reign of his adolescence has begun. Hermione the boffin (Emma Watson) has blossomed into Hermione the babe, and the gormless, cockney Ron (Rupert Grint) is turning into a real geezer, the new Dennis Waterman in waiting. Harry Potter the film franchise has grown up, too. The British director David Yates – best known for television work such as State of Play and Richard Curtis’s The Girl in the Café – has cut the cute-creature quota and the light comedy that would appeal to kids. He’s even spared us the book’s quidditch contest, thank God.

Every time there is a new Potter, you get a great geek chorus crying: “This one is much darker!” Actually, Yates doesn’t delve into dark places; Potter’s world is one of grey foreboding. There is trouble on the horizon and turmoil at Hogwarts. The comforting certainties of Harry’s childhood are being shattered by the doubts of adolescence. But although this film is less fun than the previous ones, it is more entertaining. Yates has managed to relax and not tried to dazzle his audience with a bag of CGI tricks – yet he has created something bigger and visually more sumptuous than before. The self-conscious, quirky Britishness of Potterville has been replaced by slicker international production values.

The film begins with poor old Harry enduring a summer break in the suburbs with his monstrous relatives, the Dursleys. He feels alone and abandoned, not having heard a word from Ron and Hermione. Then he is expelled from his beloved Hogwarts for illegal use of magic after he has to cast a spell to defend himself against two Dementors. His protector, Hogwarts’s head-master, Dumbledore (Michael Gambon), arranges for Harry to appear before the Ministry of Magic to appeal the expulsion decision. Harry wins and returns to Hogwarts, only to find he is treated with suspicion. Nobody, especially the ministry, believes his warnings that Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes) is back.

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Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

First review of fifth instalment: fails to cause stir of earlier films and feels like a chore

Related Internet Links

• Watch Screen Online - Harry Potter special

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We’re clearly heading for another bout between Harry and Voldemort, but the problem faced by Yates and the screenwriter, Michael Goldenberg, is what to do for the next two hours. Well, there are villains to face at Hogwarts. The most formidable is the new Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher, Dolores Umbridge (Imelda Staunton), who is a pink blancmange full of poison. She is a type familiar to contemporary Britain: the busybody bureaucrat, forever banning this and that on grounds of safety or fun. When she outlaws the practice of learning defensive spells, Harry organises a rebellion and secretly teaches a band of his fellow students the spells that they will need to protect themselves.

Radcliffe is still, for me, the weakest link in the series. This is his fifth Potter film, but he seems as stiff as a drama student making his film debut. He doesn’t have the dramatic range to bring to life the emotional turmoil Harry is undergoing. Another problem is intrinsic to JK Rowling’s original creation. I know Harry and his pals occupy a parallel world to us Muggles (normal folk), but they seem to have come out of some golly-gosh era of the 1930s, when clean-cut middle-class youth never picked their noses, fidgeted, said disgusting things or even thought them. The nearest Harry gets to the real grit and grunge of adolescence is when we see his first kiss, with Cho Chang (Katie Leung). But it is such a tepid, polite and cautious snog, you’d think he had a condom on his tongue. We could have done with more of their relationship. How, we wonder, does he feel about snogging his dead mate Cedric’s girl?

As always, you get the bonus of top British acting talent: Fiennes, Gary Oldman, David Thewlis and Helena Bonham Carter (looking like a crazed Johnny Depp in drag). All display a polished professionalism, though none delivers an inspired performance. That’s left to Staunton and the brilliant Alan Rickman as Severus Snape – the man has more darkness in one of his crouching eyebrows than most screen villains have in their evil hearts. And, for once, we have a film whose climax lives up to its promise. The battle between the Order of the Phoenix and the Death Eaters, led by the debonair Lucius Malfoy (Jason Isaacs), has a real energy and dramatic edge. It is sequences like these, and Yates’s ability to keep the story moving with flair and pace, that make this the best Harry Potter so far.

12A, 138 mins

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