'SUP, MUGGLES. Who's excited about the new Harry Potter movie? Who's excited? Who's excited? Who? Who? Who's excited? I KNOW, RIGHT!? FUCK. Zzzzzzzzzzzz.
Whu? Sorry. How long was I asleep? Who's the president? I'm hungry. Oh, right. The movie! Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince starts dark and noirish: violent flashbulbs, shrieking trains, a dingy diner, flying Death Eaters (that name is still the most embarrassing construction in J. K. Rowling's universe). Sucks to be Londontown right now. Meanwhile, Hogwarts has a new Potions teacher (Jim "Complete Fucking Genius" Broadbent, a big tweed sausage casing stuffed with pathos, hot air, and googly eyeballs), Dumbledore has a new theory ("This cabinet contains memories pertaining to one person: VOLDEMORT!"), and Harry has a new book and a new boner (Ginny Weasley, growing up awkward). And it's all, you know, suuuper-duper okay. In that slightly disappointing Harry-Potter-movie kind of way.
The film—directed by David Yates, the man who mediocred the shit out of 2007's Order of the Phoenix—offers some magnificent visuals: The production design absolutely steals the show, particularly in Snape's angular, sopping hometown and the Weasley twins' so-happy-it's-macabre joke shop and that part when Harry and Dumbledore stand on a rock for no reason. Amazing. And there are other good things. The young Voldemort is an appropriately eerie sociopath, the scene where whatsername touches the cursed necklace thingy is as pantie-poopingly TERRIFYING as in the book, and—most notably—Yates does a lovely job with the lighter moments of teenage life: Ron and Harry wrestling over a textbook, the politics of wizard crushes, the onset of SNOGGING (so much snogging!), and even boring old Quidditch. Fun times. Wizard fun.
(Side note: Dudes, you did not luck out with these actor-children. Daniel Radcliffe is pale and stiff, and can barely act [except in one scene when, loose on luck potion, he turns inexplicably into a comic genius]; Emma Watson is beautiful but flat; that Draco Malfoy kid looks like albino Screech.)
But—but!!!—how can it be possible that after five tries (Alfonso Cuarón's totally legit Prisoner of Azkaban excepted, obv) the Harry Potter franchise still hasn't figured out how to turn a book into a movie? Half-Blood Prince is 153 minutes long. It is lumpy. It confuses. The source material offers plenty of cinematic potential—it's mysterious and illuminating and scary as fuck—but the film plays out like one long, labored anticlimax, with all the wrong alterations and weird clunky dialogue dragging the plot along (actual quote: "So what was Draco doing with that weird-looking cabinet? And who were all those people?"). Being a complete nerd, of course, I'm fine with it. Being a movie critic, I'm not. Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. 
