It's not a good sign, or portent, or whatever

Part 1' proves to be the emancipated elf Dobby, a bandy-legged, floppy-eared, scrawny-necked and mostly digital creature -- based on Toby Jones's performance -- who yanks really hard at your heartstrings in his hour of distress. Nor is it much help that Dobby's big moment comes almost two hours into this ponderous film adaptation of the seventh and last book in J.K. Rowling's series. Part 2 will unfold as another full-length feature.

Then what of Harry, Ron and Hermione? Well, they're on a climactic mission to defeat the evil and essentially noseless Voldemort by finding and destroying all the Horcruxes, failing which we might never get to Part 2. Along the way, you may find yourself obsessing about exactly how many Horcruxes must still be found, since the dark and doomy mission is relieved only by a cheerful wedding, a pleasant dance and a beautiful stretch of animation. What's worse, some mysterious movie curse has turned the three once-lively adventurers into wood.

Daniel Radcliffe, as Harry, spends a great deal of time looking pensive, or worried. At one point he says, with exasperation, 'This is completely mental!' Yes, and you wish it were emotional. Hermione is still the brains of the operation, yet the appealing young actress Emma Watson is called upon to wear a bleak expression that ill becomes her. Did the director, David Yates, forget that at least some of this stuff was supposed to be fun?Rupert Grint has grown up to be a skillful actor who knows the value of a slow burn, but the book dictates that Ron be afflicted by jealousy and anger, so, here again, what you read is what you get, and not one smile more.

The book dictates a vast assortment of details, interludes and ancillary characters; that's the nature, and the pleasure, of literary density. Their presence in the movie, which was adapted by Steve Kloves, may well be obligatory, as well as gratifying to the book's fans, but they take an awful toll on narrative momentum -- every two minutes the action whooshes sideways to someone somewhere else.

Those characters include multiple Harrys as decoys, a device that's handled joylessly. The interludes include a long -- and I mean long -- stay in a forest, where Hermione uses an extension charm not that the movie needed extension to turn her small bag into a cornucopia containing, among other things, a camping tent. Many of the production's deficits are baffling -- the commonplace chases, the murky look, the indifferent effects -- but none more so than the interior of the tent, which looks like a big and banal stage set before the enchantment sets in.