Everything about “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” the adaptation of J.K. Rowling’s phenomenally popular book, feels once-removed, as if the movie had been reincarnated rather than filmed. “Sorcerer’s Stone” spends so much time curtsying in the direction of the author and her hard-core fans that you begin to wonder why they didn’t just have Rowling sit in the middle of the screen and read aloud for 2 1/2 hours.
Instead, director Chris Columbus and writer Steve Kloves bring the otherwise hectic movie to a grinding halt every so often, while a couple of 11-year-olds sit there and spout windy summaries of the book’s plot, offering Cliff Notes versions of scenes that didn’t make it in.
The effects are special, but too often they’re the only thing that is. They seem to drive the story, instead of the other way around. “Sorcerer’s Stone” lurches from spectacle to spectacle with little real magic and no sense of where it’s headed or memory of where it’s been. Or why it took 2 1/2 hours to get there.
It all feels like Spielberg Lite, a movie with a high-gloss, spun-sugar finish that’s empty on the inside but seems eager to please everyone. Literally. Everyone.
Rowling has borrowed liberally from biblical mythology and from such blockbuster franchises as the “Star Wars” and Indiana Jones movies. Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe) is orphaned as an infant by a character so evil he often is referred to as He Who Must Not Be Named. Harry’s parents were good wizards, but their murderer has embraced what sounds suspiciously like the dark side of the Force. Even his real name — Voldemort — sounds a little like Vader.
The murder of Harry’s parents is never described in the book, and by refusing to show it, the movie squanders the first of its opportunities to separate itself from — and possibly even surpass — the book. As a result, we have no real sense of Voldemort’s power as Harry’s adversary, or of the pitched battle between these emissaries of good and evil, until the movie is almost over.
Instead, we get Dudley Dursley, Harry’s mean cousin played with an over-eager unpleasantness by Harry Melling, and Potter’s odious classmate Draco Malfoy (Tom Felton), a boy so blond, so lacquered-looking and so arrogant that you get the feeling he might burst into a chorus of the “Horst Wessel Song” at any moment.
The Dursleys, whose number also includes Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon (played by Fiona Shaw and Richard Griffiths), torment poor Harry until a letter inviting him to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry arrives by carrier owl on his 11th birthday. We don’t really know why the Dursleys are so mean to Harry until, in one of the film’s many long expository scenes, Petunia petulantly perorates about her dead sister — Harry’s mother — who was, she shrieks, “a freak!” And a witch.
Harry’s transformation from orphan to wizard contains many of the movie’s best scenes, especially his visit to Diagon Alley, a magical lane in London where conjurers shop and where we learn for the first time that Harry Potter is famous for having survived Voldemort’s ambush with just a lightning bolt scar on his forehead.
And that’s about all we get. Very little effort is expended to make Harry seem either charismatic or strong. He’s a bland blank, and Radcliffe brings little to the task of breathing life into him. In the great hall at the school — where candles hang suspended in the air — director Columbus has the other young wizards look at him and go slack-jawed. We never really understand why they’re so wild about Harry, which makes it difficult for us to be over-awed by him.
The quest for the Sorcerer’s Stone feels grafted onto the movie’s real business, which is to get this lumbering film and action-figure franchise off the ground by introducing Hogwarts and its enormous cast of characters. As Albus Dumbledore, the headmaster of Hogwarts, Richard Harris looks like Mr. Chips on blotter acid. Maggie Smith once again plays Maggie Smith, this time as the prim Professor McGonagall.
The one memorable adult performance is turned in by Alan Rickman, who plays Professor Snape with malefactoring Goth gusto. As for the children, whose emotional range does not seem to extend beyond the bugging out of eyeballs, acting lessons would seem to be in order before the next installment.
This deficiency is especially evident in scenes such as the one in which Harry discovers a mirror in which he can see his parents, long dead but smiling back at him. Dumbledore tells him the mirror shows “the deepest and most desperate desires of our heart.”
As a reflection of a child’s deep longing for his parents, it evokes Dorothy’s tearful gaze from Oz at Auntie Em. But as a plot point, it doesn’t go anywhere, and when Harry shows almost no emotion as he watches his parents, it just seems a little creepy.
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
** 1/2