Lessons learned from Alfonso Cuarón's inspired adaptation of The Prisoner of Azkaban, which so successfully integrated the magic half of J.K. Rowling’s wizard detective plot with character half of the story, the awkwardness, turmoil, passions, and unease of Harry Potter turning into a teenager, has been jettisoned completely in the sequel. Goblet of Fire is a near incomprehensible combination of name-checking random book details, adherence to a pointless wizard competition, and truncated instances of the kids’ pubescent interaction. It misses the inspiration and glee that the kids find in continuing to explore Rowling's world of secret magic, and equally misses the importance and weight of simple relationships in such overwhelmingly surroundings.

Whether or not the competition for the Wizard Cup was properly explained or motivated in the source novel, here it feels like a perfunctory activity to keep Harry busy and the film filled with new computer generated sights and sounds. Gone are the days when the magical challenges and mysteries that Potter faced were intrinsically tied to themes of the growth of the young boy’s self-discovery, self-confidence, friendships and his surrogate family of wizards and teachers. Putting teenagers in life or death situations for little or no reason beyond engendering “international friendship” and "eternal glory," and structured around puzzles that don't need to be solved, haphazard ranking, and simple-minded tests of "moral fiber," the competition has nothing to do with the boy-now-teen Potter learning more about himself, others, or the world around him.

This function is instead relegated to the far more human and far more interesting B-plot of the film, involving typical school anxieties like jealousy among friends and unexpressed crushes, all of which are supposed to come to a head when the first school ball is held. These relationships, so crucial to making "Harry Potter the legend" into the more sympathetic and more archetypal regular boy, are sequestered behind the plot's larger concerns with setting up a story-arc to continue into the next films, namely of chronicling hints of Voldemort's reappearance through Potter's unimaginatively envisioned nightmares and dark threats during the Goblet competition. The spinning confusion amongst the complicated feelings of Harry and his two best friends, Ron and Hermione, which have so many interesting facets driving them, among of which class, wealth, and fame, are tragically cut short in an already extremely long movie.

The emphasis on an empty, effects-laden plot over character interaction is especially strange considering the director replacing Cuarón is Mike Newell (Donnie Brasco, Four Weddings and Funeral), who should be far more comfortable exploring the contradictions, conflicts, and subtleties of a triangle of average kids put into magical surroundings then he should be orchestrating massive computer-based action sequences, which indeed are poorly rendered, awkwardly staged, and devoid of emotional anxiety. Each side of the film’s story, if it can even be called that, feels like a short episode on a TV miniseries—"This week on Harry Potter, Harry tries for the Wizard's Cup! Stay tuned for next week's episode for the Hogwart's ball - who will ask Hermione?" —and neither side is given enough attention to be satisfying in and of themselves. The film seems consciously constructed simply to touch upon recognizable plot point and world-detail flag poles from the book so that readers can see key moments visualized (the ball, the dragon, the maze, Voldemort) and are supposed, if not required, to fill in the meat, the real interesting stuff, themselves. The complaint is not that the film is alienating non-fans, but rather that the film does not even work as a film. This is a large backwards step from the deeply impressionistic The Prisoner of Azkaban, and just goes to show how important the director-choice is in the effectiveness, as well as affectiveness, and memorability of the series. Here's hoping they get a new filmmaker for the fifth film.