Ah, sequels. Is there anything more spiritually fulfilling than watching a character you previously admired thrown once more into the Hollywood breach, emerging to fight evil again, this time with a wacky sidekick and a ditzy blonde by his side?

If you can't tell, I'm not too big a fan of sequels. So it was with a bit of trepidation that I approached Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, the second film chronicling the favorite wizard of the Western world (Alistair Crowley notwithstanding). To be fair to the movie, it's not your typical sequel. Chamber of Secrets wasn't made as a result of some producer somewhere remarking to himself, "These Harry Potter plush toys are selling really well. Let's pump out another movie so I can unload some action figures on the public, too." This film isn't a hasty excuse to get those lovable kids back on-screen so much as an artistic work that can stand on its own merits, and thus I grant it more leeway than I give most sequels.

Since most of the known world has read this book, I won't bore you by going into the plot. Suffice to say, there is a mystery at Hogwart's School for Wizardry, and only Harry Potter and friends can solve it. All the gang is back for this installment, most notably Harry himself (Daniel Radcliffe), Hermione Granger (Emma Watson), Ron Weasley (Rupert Grint), and Harry's arch-enemy, Draco Malfoy (Tom Felton, who looks more and more like Eminem every time I see him).

This is a good movie, but I didn't like it as much as I liked its predecessor, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, mostly because it falls into the age-old sequel trap of not providing proper exposition.

A film's exposition serves two main functions: First, it inspires the audience to become involved with the movie. If the story and characters are good, the audience will be drawn into the movie's world, and will be less critical of its faults. Second, the exposition gives the director something to do when he's not advancing the plot.

In Sorcerer's Stone, the audience was gradually introduced to an entirely new, utterly fantastic world, and that world was created with so much skill that it was believable. The director, Chris Columbus, obviously had a lot of fun creating Harry's surroundings, and they were consequently a lot of fun to watch.

This time around, the movie as a whole isn't nearly as much fun. In Chamber of Secrets, we're immediately thrust back into the thick of things with characters that we already know, in a place that's by now familiar. As a result, I wasn't nearly as emotionally involved with this movie as I was with the first installment in the series. And, since I wasn't as absorbed by the film's setting, a few things became more apparent to me in this movie than they were in The Sorcerer's Stone.

First of all, the main characters are children, and thus are not good actors. What audiences tend to forget is that for every Haley Joel Osment or Tatum O'Neal there are hundreds of actors just like that kid who played Annakin in the first Star Wars movie.

In Sorcerer's Stone, the kids on screen weren't particularly talented, but I didn't mind.

In the sequel, however, the stiffness of the leads is all too apparent. In particular, Radcliffe's performance is wooden enough to start fires with. Considering he spends much of the movie trying not to be brutally murdered, you'd think he could at least get that darned "fear" emotion down.

Chamber of Secrets also has problems with its narrative structure. Part of this is as a result of the source material it draws upon. J.K. Rowling's book (on which this film is based) is generally acknowledged to be the weakest of the Harry Potter series. Because of this, and the fact that there's no underlying story beneath the central mystery, Columbus isn't able to tie the scenes together into a cohesive narrative. Consequently, this film doesn't flow like a good story should.

This is not to say that Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets is a bad movie. It's not. In fact, I enjoyed it quite a bit.

In particular, the set design in this film is fantastic (With one notable exception: For some reason, the filmmakers decided to use in one scene a sword that looks like it was bought at Toys R Us). When we finally see the chamber of secrets, it is stunning, proving that the set designer for these movies is the best in the business.

The acting by the adults (for the brief periods when they are allowed on-screen) is superb. Particularly surprising is Kenneth Branagh's turn as the egotistical Professor Gilderoy Lockhart. I think this movie may mark the only time in recorded history when Kenneth Branagh managed to underact in a part.

For all these winning qualities, however, the movie just felt flatter and less magical to me than it's predecessor. I didn't experience the same sense of discovery and (cliché as it is) wonderment watching Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets that I felt when I watched The Sorcerer's Stone.