Awaited by trillions, Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets’ box-office success would have been assured had it been the laziest blockbuster ever made. As it turns out, though, the second instalment of Harry successfully repeats the same trick as last year’s Philosopher’s Stone adaptation and proves to be a zippy and charming affair, if perhaps lacking the seductive narrative pull of its literary equivalent.

By popular demand, there are no surprises at all about Chamber Of Secrets, but few will find cause to complain. Almost slavishly faithful in its attempted replication of the novel, there’s obvious care taken to include everyone’s favourite moments, infinitely better special effects and a vastly superior Quidditch match. The result may not be at all original, but Chamber Of Secrets fulfils every reasonable expectation of modern event cinema.

As most of Pluto knows, hero Harry (Radcliffe), an orphaned kid, kicks off this episode back in the miserable confines of his callous cousins’ house, longing to return to his beloved Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Best pal Ron Weasley (Rupert Grint) accompanies him on the return, replete with several truly magnificent special-effects roller-coaster rides, to find a changed and sinister Hogwarts, in keeping with Chamber’s turn towards a darker and doomier sensibility. There are hints of blood, darkness and evil here on a scale that would send kids home screaming if the balance was tilted any further towards the dark side: there is, though, little that’s truly disturbing.

Faster-paced than its predecessor, Chamber Of Secrets still stretches endurance to the limit at a (for kids) marathon 160 minutes, while one or two harsh souls have found fault with the perfectly adequate lead performance of teenage Daniel Radcliffe. On almost all levels, however, the film is everything that Potter devotees could reasonably have wished for.