Geekomon

SPOILER ALERT
If you're lazy, I'll just straight out and tell you that this was an enjoyable piece of fluff catered to HP fanboys. The movie can't really stand on its own. All the structures and basic plot points have been edited away. But the average person will still like this film because A) it's funny and B)lots of action. WAIT FOR THE EXTENDED DVD, son.

Now for the meat. The story is mainly a mystery. Who entered Harry into the Questathon?
Since the Questathon is dangerous, someone must be USING THE QUESTS TO KILL HARRY. Now this in turn, gives us suspects. Enter the RED HERRINGS. Which then goes on and on, until the 3 quests of the Questathon is over, and the big plot twist reveals that the initial assumption was misleading, as well as wrong. Just so happens, the Bad Guys didn't aim for the quests to do Harry in--in fact, they wanted him to win the damn Questathon. And there are various clues in both the movie and the novel to lead you Sherlockly to this conclusion. It's not a bad story.

However, here's the rub. Everytime the movie runs into the important parts, some magical idea vacuum comes in and edits it all away. The primary assumption that a Bad Guy must want the quests to kill Harry is not emphasized. What use is the inclusion of the many Red Herrings without the necessary Misleading Assumption?

And since this primary assumption was bypassed, the secondary deduction was also missing: there's an infiltrator inside Hogwarts with unfettered access to the cup.
This is super important because both the RED HERRING part and the PLOT TWIST part both depend on this secondary deduction. If you aren't going to put the misleading assumptions/deductions in, why the hell are nearly all the RED HERRINGS in place? It'll not make sense to those whom've never read the book.

Having said all this, I'm looking forward to the DVD extended version of this film. We are looking at the death of modern cinema as we know it. Seriously, it is super stupid to have theatre releases. Blind Tradition = Slow Death.