Harry Potter had been able to grab book fans and newcomers through its film franchise which became a big hit and a worldwide sensation with its showcase of Philosopher Stone and only continued to grow with each passing film. Even if fans were unhappy with how some of the movies played out in comparison to the J.K. Rowling  books (which is something to be expected in any adaptation), it was a phenomenon that anybody who grew up in the 2000s knew about, with the first three movies capturing audiences rather easily. The fourth instalment released in 2005, Goblet of Fire, was meant to be a turning point for the series, acting as a transition into the darker aspects of the story and leaning more towards young adults than just children. However, unlike its previous films, this movie screeches the hype train to a sour halt, taking away a lot of what the other movies did decently enough and only added more to keeping this snail-paced story as dull as possible with a film that in many respects doesn’t satisfy anyone. Set in their fourth year of Hogwarts, the magical trio; Harry, Ron and Hermione (played by Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint and Emma Watson) arrive after surviving a terror attack from a group of Death Eaters, a radical group who are loyal to the dark wizard, Voldemort, and learn that the school will be taking place in The Triwizard Tournament; a series of life-threatening challenges between three schools to claim ‘’eternal glory’’ for oneself and their respected school, with the French school Beauxbaton and the central European school Durmstrang competing as well. Against Beauxbatons’ Fleur Delacour (played by Clemence Poesy) and Durmstrang’s Viktor Krum (played by Stanislav Yanevski), Hogwarts finds its champion in Cedric Diggory (played by Robert Pattinson), but to everyone’s surprise, also discover that Harry has been anonymously placed in as well and due to the confused rules surrounding this goblet and its tournament, he can’t easily be removed. The school, wanting to continue holding its title as one of the most negligent child-endangering schools ever put on Earth, decide to let Harry compete, putting him at odds with others in the school who believe he entered as a means of attention (even his best friends). Part of a game that he was literally unprepared for with the only support coming from the new defense against the dark arts teacher, Alastor ”Mad Eye”  Moody (played by Brendan Gleeson), Harry and the other three contestants face off against three deathly challenges involving dragons, underwater creatures and a literal killer maze in order to see which school will come out on top, all the while a shadow of a dark lord returning looms over Harry’s mind. From the description alone, the film’s faults are obvious, yet the film manages to exceed even those low expectations and produces a film that is long, boring, dull looking, full of annoying teenage angst, and above all else, 100% pointless to its overall narrative outside of a few scenes. What should have been the pivotal next step into growing up this franchise, it instead acted as a tool for showing how these films weren’t as spotless as many believed they could be.

This film honestly had a tricky road to travel already as the book it’s based on has problems that would’ve made it a hard thing to adapt anyway. Already being a packed film with a lot of needless content, this is a problem the book suffers with as well, featuring an incredibly convoluted mysteries, an overload of padding, and an incredibly weak and meaningless storyline that adds nothing of value and seems more interested in providing world-building fluff as a trade-off. This film arguably has the most removed from its source material when translating it, resulting in a picture that feels like 80% of it is missing with its 20% remainder being very weak, minute in scale and lacking in depth, but it doesn’t matter as most of what is removed is also just fluff. To the film’s as well as screenwriter, Steve Kloves’, credit, it does cut out a lot of the pointless elements of the book to try and squeeze something together, but when your main narrative structure is filer and, in many respects, feel like the most ”side story” out of any other book in your series, there’s not much that can be done to save it. The actual tournament isn’t a bad idea and could’ve provide a nice window into other angles of this wizarding world, but it needed to be balanced out with actual story progress and development and it feels so crammed together with a ton of useless moments and side plots that seem to come and go. Instead of feeling darker and harsher, the film unfortunately comes across as whining, childish and incredibly moody, taking the other film’s stabling charm and replacing it with dull annoyance; the characters are all jerks to each other, the film is incredibly bland looking and lacks that distinct visual personality and flair, the writing has typical tween-ism like bitter romances that are so tiring to watch, and the lack of inventive magical elements is so apparent is this film that it’s almost like they were training their audience to expect nothing whimsical in these flicks anymore and instead get used to very standard visuals, ideas and even moments. With that said, director Mike Newell (ironically the first British filmmaker to direct one of these films) does his best at keeping this mess of a plot together to at least produce a decently structure movie. The pace is done okay, the relevant scenes feel like they’re in the right place, and the actors are given pretty good direction this time so that even when these generic scenes are done, they aren’t painful from a filmmaking perspective. The only two moments of the film that actually work effectively and produce memorable moments are the opening at the Quidditch world tournament, with the actual terror attack having some good tension and cinematography, and the climax which involves a graveyard confrontation as well as an adequately done death scene, providing this franchise with an actual sense of consequence and threat that hadn’t been featured previously and maybe could’ve been more effective if the story was better put together. The whole movie feels like it was using the tournament to hold the audience hostage until the final 20mins brought something of worth to the table.

Most of the main characters have gone from a little bland but at least useful, to being slightly annoying and incredibly useless. Many of the characters who did stuff in these movies have been swept aside for sole attention on Harry, who isn’t interesting enough to hold the movie alone. Even when the actors are trying to make this work, the roles they’ve been placed in don’t work with their weak characterization. Harry’s still boring, he and Ron have a pointless argument that disappears pretty easily making it feel even more useless, Hermione doesn’t do much besides turn into the romantic item for all the boys, and the teachers seem to cause more harm than good in this movie. The only ones that get out okay are the Weasley twins Fred and George (played by real-life twins Oliver and James Phelps) who get some funny moments and work great off each other because of their real-life twin-synergy, and Matthew Lewis as Neville, who actually turns in a good performance for his bit part. The new characters are a mixed bag; on the one hand, the new teacher Mad Eye Moody has a good look with his peg-leg, mattered face, and giant piercing eye, and Brendan Gleeson is having a lot of fun playing him, there’s this magical journalist played by Miranda Richardson who does pretty good acting this is scummy reporter who only cares about content that can exploit others in a messed-up in, and Frances de la Tour as the giantess running the Beauxbaton school looks pretty cool and even has a nice relationship with Hagrid (played again by Robbie Coltrane). But on the other hand, the other schools as well as their combatants barely have time to develop any personality outside of the bare minimum tropes you’d expect (one is manly, the other is girly, it’s as complex as that). Robert Pattinson is just the pretty boy for the girls to gawk at, even if his acting is fine and his ending does work effective enough, Gary Oldman is literally a one-off cameo that doesn’t leave much of an impression outside of a cool visual of him appearing in the fireplace, and the film even manages to waste a great actor like David Tennant in a throwaway cameo, even if he does that really good regardless. Voldemort is finally shown and though his design is a little boring (even a little silly) and despite containing good build up, he doesn’t have a lot of motivation, he at least has a bit of presence, isn’t a complete bore to watch, and Ralph Fiennes does a good job at trying to give a character that wasn’t written to have a personality any sense of character.

The movie is incredibly dull looking from a production standpoint and feels like it’s going overboard to feel dark and edgy by sucking out everything light about this world and this premise. Anything creative and fun about a magical world is complete gone, the production design and costume design by Stuart Craig and Jany Temime is so bland and lacking in any unique touches, the overall art direction just contains a lot of blacks, greys and blues for its color palette, and even the Triwizard tournament, aside from a few cool shots during a scene where Harry is flying from a dragon around the castle, doesn’t have much to remember visually. While the visuals themselves look pretty drab, the cinematography by Roger Pratt actually gets a few memorable shots that either show a location really well or creates good atmosphere for a specific moment. It has a good variety of close ups, tilts, establishing shots, and it does feel different from the other movies in style with a grander and more cinematic feel. The series has lost most of its mixture between actual physical props and CG and goes a bit too much into the effects department, making everything feel a bit too fabricated and not as authentic as the other films, though the actual makeup on Voldemort was a nice touch. The music (this time scored by Patrick Doyle) isn’t as memorable as the other films either, mainly just repeating the original theme in a slightly different way without anything new brought to the table. The film isn’t even very dark, just mildly grey, and horribly moody in attitude, the other films were better at handling the dark stuff because the contrast between the light and dark was more effective and the threats were much more creative.

Goblet of Fire tried to be something more intense, and instead left something way more forgettable than its predecessor. While it’s hard to say that the film is technically that bad as it does have effort put into it when it comes to most of the acting, the cinematography and the directing, the horrible story line ties a noose around this movie’s neck that makes it almost impossible to stop its poor execution. That mixed with the unlikeable tone, bland visuals, and the fact that only now has something story relevant actually happened in these movies, it’s a pretty stale fourth instalment. For the die-hard fans who love the franchise unconditionally, it can be salvaged if they can handle the changes from the book (which a lot of them didn’t to the point that they became furious over the delivery of a single Dumbledore line), but any other participant, you’ll wish this cup was broken much sooner.

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