Wife and I caught Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince today. We’ve both read the books, which makes watching the movie a little less interesting. Still, it was something to to do on a summer afternoon. Our local critic noticed the large teen soap-opera content, as Harry, Ron and Hermione work through youthful entanglements. The rest of the movie is largely given over to providing background, or the search for background. There are not nearly so many action scenes as in the previous movies, though the few they have are pretty high quality. But four or five action scenes in an almost three-hour movie ain’t much. This movie seems to see its role as setting up the audience for the two Deathly Hallows films, and it is a success as far as that goes. As an entertainment, though, it’s kind of weak.