Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (PG)

It's wizard for grown-ups

Not everyone likes midnight feasts, not everyone aspires to be top-hole at sports. And for such people, should they be dragged by a darling child to see Harry Potter, I bring good tidings: the second installment of this "wizard" series is far less jolly-hockey-sticks than the first. Rather significantly, we get an early quidditch match (hockey by any other name), but the follow up gets cancelled, and we don't hear another peep from the golden snitch. JK Rowling and the director Chris Columbus could have forced us to play games; they've written us a sick note instead.

True, much about the yawnsome HP formula has been left intact. After another summer with the dreaded Dursleys, Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) returns to Hogwarts, and his chums Ron (Rupert Grint) and Hermione (Emma Watson). And once again there's trouble afoot, which somehow involves beastly blond snob Draco Malfoy (Tom Felton), warm-hearted slob Hagrid (Robbie Coltrane), lots of rule breaking in a good cause and a final battle in the depths of the earth (in this case, a hidden chamber) which brings Harry face to one of the faces of he-who-can't-be-named.

It's how we arrive at this inevitable conclusion that's interesting. In 1997, Neil Jordan directed The Butcher Boy, a twisted tale about a little boy, who thinks of himself as a hero. A virtual orphan, Francie becomes locked in a battle with a po-faced, aspirational housewife who spoils her only son; then gets sent off to an institution in the country, where it becomes obvious that he can see and hear things others can't. The institution proves an unsafe place for children and Francie becomes increasingly aggressive. Voices impel him to kill, and, round about the time he scrawls words on the wall using blood, we realise he's tipped completely into madness.

Now imagine a blockbuster take on the same material. Fiona Shaw, by the by, plays the mean matriarch in both movies, but it's more than that. With his aunt's favourite insult ("freak") still ringing in his ears, Harry arrives back at Hogwarts. There, the caretaker's cat is discovered, petrified, next to some menacing graffiti, freshly written with its blood. At the same time, a breathy voice in Harry's head urges him to kill. His pals can't reassure him about "the voices", and are even more alarmed when he starts talking to a snake in a special language, and seemingly encourages it to menace a nerdy boy. When more children are found petrified, the younger kids start to look at Harry with real fear.

It's not Radcliffe's performance that makes the violence feel so raw. His mouth, as in the first film, is as stiff as a ventriloquist's dummy, but he handles slithery "parcel tongue" much better than English. More importantly, the atmosphere around him hits just the right, unbalanced note. Foul-looking water fills the corridors; Richard Harris's Dumbledore doesn't so much talk as drag breath up from his chest (that we now know Harris was dying inevitably adds to our sense that this leader is frail). As Neil Jordan would surely appreciate, the whole place is Bedlam.

Undoubtedly grim, much of this neurotic horror is also deliciously funny. Particularly spry are new characters, Dobby and Moaning Myrtle. The former is an elf who appears in Harry's bedroom right at the start, to warn him against a return to Hogwarts. Dobby wears a Gandhi-style jerkin, but is somewhat lacking in serenity. When he fails to meet his own high standards (which is often), he bangs his head and "irons" his hands (he airily shows off the bandaged stubs). Way to go, self-harmer.

Meanwhile, Moaning Myrtle (Shirley Henderson) is a bespectacled child-ghost who haunts the girls' toilets. When not pondering this mortal coil, Myrtle is an avid vandal (it's she who regularly floods the building) and like most hysterics, her trump card is weakness – she's positively tigerish when recalling her "distraught" state at the moment of death. Proximity to plumbing seems to have rendered her sexually knowing, too. All the kids are gripped by crushes this time around, (even Ron's little sister Ginny) but Myrtle's urges are in a different league. When Harry goes off in search of the chamber, Myrtle simpers, "If you die down there, you're welcome to share my toilet!" Henderson's fans know all about her breathless giggles, but the one that follows here is expertly wicked.

Post-graduate English students have also been catered for. I'm convinced Hermione has been swotting up on Saussure. Then there's Kenneth Branagh's Gilderoy Lockhart, a Jeffrey Archer-ish author who becomes a prisoner of his own (literary) device. Another crucial writer figure is phantom diary-keeper Tom Riddle (Christian Coulson). Shot in black and white, he's as fresh and doomed as a First World War poet, or the ghosts in classic children's novels like Tom's Midnight Garden, or Charlotte Sometimes – both an advertisement for time travel via olde-wolde books, and a useful warning. Where the first Harry presented a carefully packaged wonderland, this film is more interested in what the modern-day consumer is trying to escape. Which, over and over again, proves to be the troublesome, messy need for sex and/or love.

Even Hagrid is part of this crazy chain, which is where the flesh-eating spiders come in. For those who simply want to be scared, then calmed, then scared again, the spiders are a glorious interlude (on the run, they click like castanets).

Naturally, not everything works. Take Jason Isaacs, as Draco's supposedly wicked dad. Imagine fashion supremo John Galliano, seconds after discovering that, this season, he'll be working with polyester. Well, Isaacs is even less scary and more peevish than that.

The soundtrack, meanwhile, is ubiquitous, and the denouement horribly self congratulatory. Beware films that end with claps and cheering – that's our job. Even more worrying is the way fat children are represented. There are a few black faces at Hogwarts, and the usual plea for tolerance (the baddies are obsessed with racial "purity"). But overweight students are consistently shown to be stupid and thuggish; their foreign bodies, apparently, still fair game for contempt.

The only consolation is that, with five installments yet to come, the film-makers may not be able to control the burgeoning adolescent bodies of the central characters. The producers' biggest nightmare is no doubt an acne-riddled Harry, kitted out in his Hogwarts' cloak, sulkily wondering if his bum looks big in this. Warner Brothers' greedy desire to maintain the franchise may be the very thing that allows all shapes and sizes to get their time in the sun.

For now, I'll settle for what I've been given. Will Harry trounce James Bond? Will he beat Two Towers (which has its own scary spiders on the way)? I hope so. Like Batman Returns, the Chamber represents a calculated risk that audiences want a little perversity with their popcorn. Chop chop. If this doesn't do spectacularly well, round three will probably involve a lot more games, and much less fun.