The Harry Potter saga nears its completion with the premiere of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows—Part 1, this past weekend. The film drew huge audiences worldwide, as expected. It took in approximately $125 million in the United States in its first weekend, and a monumental $330 million worldwide.

That’s the biggest opening weekend for a Harry Potter film so far, and audiences will probably continue to flock to Deathly Hallows Pt 1, having invested much time and money in the series thus far.

I suspect, however, that the film will engender a certain amount of disappointment. The producers have chosen to forgo almost entirely the more lighthearted, charming elements of the series—the humor, the styles and technologies of bygone eras, the amusing byplay among the central characters—in favor of a more contemporary look that emphasizes the darker, more sinister aspects of the story.

These latter have been in the ascendant throughout the film version of the saga, as the presentations have become somewhat darker in tone with each installment. And that was all to the good, as the seriousness helped audiences identify with the characters and their plight in spite of the fanciful nature of the premise.

Unfortunately, I think this overbalances Deathly Hallows Pt 1, as we lose much of what we previously enjoyed about the series and which made it unique, instead getting a large amount of visual and narrative cliches from contemporary action and suspense films. We get quite a few chase scenes on foot and on flying brooms, and these look basically like any chase scene in any action movie today, with the wands taking the place of guns, of course. These are neither original in the contemporary cinema or in the Potter series, and they’re really rather boring in the present case.

Similarly, there is a shootout in a cheap diner, again with the wands standing in for handguns. This diner is not a quaint, Victorian place but just a crappy London diner. This too is emblematic of Deathly Hallows Pt 1, as few of the locations have the olden-tymes charm of the previous installments in the series. The forests are no longer enchanting but now dreary. Snow and ice are a prevalent motif. We get it: this is Serious.

An even worse choice is the inclusion of long, dreary, and horribly cliched scenes in which Nazi types have taken over the world of the magicians. Not having read the book on which the film is based, I don’t know whether this was a big part of Rowling’s narrative, but I do know that in this film it is just awful. It comes off as cheap ripoff of Brazil and several dozen other films that used the imagery a good deal more effectively than director David Yates manages to do.

Similarly, there’s a chase sequence that looks very much a scene from Terminator 3, and the other action sequences emulate Top Gun and other well-known films. They do not fit well in this story, in my view, and the sequences add little to the narrative.

As for the characters, again we appear to have wandered into no-fun-land. Dumbledore is dead; we see vanishingly few of Harry’s fellow students other than Hermione and Ron; and we see only a few of the teachers, and largely unpleasant ones, for only a very brief time. The main exception to this is Bellatrix Lestrange, who is rather boring in her cliched evilness, alas.

The dialogue scenes are likewise skewed toward earnestness and ominous intimations. Harry and Hermione engage in endless discussions about things they consider very serious (the substance of which was so uninteresting that I have forgotten what they were going on and on about), and there are similar dialogue sessions with Ron Weasley; all of these seem interminable.

On the plus side, there is the whole good-versus-evil plotline still in place, the main characters retain our sympathy and concern even as they try our patience, and the film is generally watchable. The action scenes, though cliched, are competently presented and manage to keep one’s attention.

The people behind the film are to be commended for following the character arc into the thorny terrain of young adulthood with all its attendant terrors. That’s certainly worth exploring. Yet one can be thoroughly serious and still entertain the audience. The pity is that the makers of Deathly Hallows Pt 1 appear to have fallen for the old illusion that seriousness means somberness. It does not: just watch any John Ford or Howard Hawks film to dispel that myth entirely.

In attempting to use a visual style to force the audience to take the film seriously, instead of trusting the narrative to do that, the people behind Deathly Hallows Pt 1 have stripped the film of much of what made the series charming and unique.

Deathly Hallows Pt 1 still retains some of that Harry Potter appeal and is enjoyable in the main, and it engages the viewer with the great plight of the central characters as they make their way into the adult world. But it doesn’t have nearly enough of the old magic for me.