Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire , the 4th installment of the Harry Potter story, was my least favorite book at that point in the series, and the same can be said about the film adaptation that was released this weekend. Like it’s dead-tree counterpart, the Goblet of Fire film is at turns boring, messy, aggravating, and nonsensical. When I finished the book, I thought that it still had a chance to become a good movie, and indeed the action scenes worked very well on the big screen, but the overly long movie suffered from the same problems as the overly long book.

Not to say that there isn’t much to like in the movie. Rowling fills the Potter universe with clever and well-rounded details such as international wizarding schools and a panoply of magical creatures and plants. But all these things lead to naught.

The major event in Goblet of Fire is the Triwizard Tournament, an arbitrary and oddly dangerous competition among three schools and Potter is one the participants. The tournament is made up of three events, for each of which the entire school packs the stands to watch as if it was the Rose Bowl. But the thing is that, aside from the first dragon-battling event, the tournament tasks are as ill-conceived as that wretched game Quidditch (which thankfully plays no role here).

And they’re terrible spectator sports as well – the second and third tasks involve the crowd staring at nothing but a lake and a forest, respectively, for one hour. The tasks, and the Tournament Yule Ball that takes place in between, make up the first 2 hours of the movie (and the first 650 pages (!) of the book). Mercifully, the Tournament pays off in a very engaging way at the end of the film (although it works better on paper), but by that point I was too exhausted in either case to really care.