“Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald” Movie Review
Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald is the 9th film in the widely beloved Harry Potter universe and the second of its prequels after 2015’s Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. In this installment, Eddie Redmayne is back as Newt Scamander, a former student of Hogwarts and author of the in-universe textbook which for which the first of these prequel films was titled. In this film, he’s tasked by a young Albus Dumbledore (here played by Jude Law) with going to Paris to find the child Credence (Ezra Miller), who was a problem in the last movie due to his insane and unstable power, because he’s the only one who could conceivably defeat Dumbledore in order to make the wizards rule over humankind forever, a plot all set in motion by Grindelwald (Johnny Depp), who escapes prison and sets out to also find Credence to this end. And if all of that sounds overlong and needlessly convoluted, I’m not even going to begin going into the issue of Credence’s genealogy, a plot point apparently so important, they center the entire reason he could defeat Dumbledore around that very mystery. Oh, and Nagini is here too, I guess.
I enjoyed the first Fantastic Beasts fine enough; it wasn’t exactly the same quality as when the Harry Potter series reached its greatest heights, but I put it about on par with the more subpar entries in that superior franchise. The characters were fun, the lead had conviction, the beasts (though not fantastic) begot a lot of enjoyment, and the additions of Dan Folger and Alison Sudol easily made up the largest highlights of the film. It’s a shame, then, that writer J.K. Rowling has opted to not only entirely abandon any sense of true narrative or plot mechanics, but all but ignore entirely that this movie even needs a story in the first place. The sad thing is, the lack of a general plot progression right up until the very end isn’t even one of the most frustrating things about the movie. What’s truly upsetting is how many opportunities it takes to go out of its own way to show you THIS thing from Harry Potter, and THIS thing from Harry Potter, and THAT name from Harry Potter, until you’re so worn down with Harry Potter references you just wish Rowling had never written the first of these movies.
To get the positives out of the way first, there’s one line that Jacob Kawolski says that actually made me laugh, the performances are all mostly fine still (even though I wrack my brain daily to find out why on God’s green earth Warner Bros is still putting Johnny Depp in anything given that one of their flagship characters movies stars his ex-wife he used to beat, Amber Heard), the visual effects are mostly pretty good…mostly…and David Yates still hasn’t lost touch when it comes to directing a big budget effects blockbuster in terms of how he moves the camera. On the shots where the camera doesn’t move? That’s a different story.
No, that’s it. Those are the only positives I can find to this movie. Luckily they’re positive enough that the film isn’t intolerable, but it only barely avoids being perhaps the worst franchise prequel since X-Men Origins: Wolverine. To even begin to start in on the negatives would nearly constitute having to get up onto a podium in front of every movie theater in America and warn you about how disappointed you’re likely going to be if you have a competent sense of filmmaking mechanics or structure or have ever seen a decent film in your life (and aren’t going to be someone who bends over backwards to praise Rowling’s writing this movie just because she wrote a now-iconic book series a while ago). From the start, the film introduces a minorly interesting idea for this universe and then not only never revisits that old trick again, but essentially makes it the one crime Grindelwald commits for the entire movie, and I’m not exaggerating – “the crimes of Grindelwald” has exactly 0 to do with the actual plot of the film, which (as we’ve discussed) there’s barely any of. And come to think of it, neither do the “fantastic beasts” these films are supposed to be about. There are a total of essentially two (2) new creatures you actually remember that pop up in this installment, and only one of them is an actual creature, whereas the other is a large dragon that’s made of fire but is only the result of a spell, having no physical incarnation in this universe for it to come from or go back to.
This would all be forgivable as a simple mistitling if the plot was at least interesting, but what of the plot there is moves at a snail’s pace while the audience not only has to jump through so many different lore and legend hoops to understand what’s going on (which there’s basically no source for because no books have been written), but is left way too bored to even care that they’re confused about any of it. By the time we actually get to the climax of the movie, Newt and Tina (Katherine Waterson from the last movie) have only just resolved an issue where Tina was mad at him because of a misprinted news article (no, really) and we’re thrown right into an exposition shouting match between all the movie’s important characters. Yes, the first time the movie shows any sort of momentum, right towards the end, it stops cold in its tracks for an overly complicated exposition shouting match between two characters about a backstory to another character that doesn’t end up matter at all.
The largest weakness of this movie, however, is that it abandons its characters and any development they might receive in order to just lay out stuff about the Harry Potter universe for the audience to look at. It’s essentially the Solo of this universe, only Solo did this sort of thing with a lot more style. Sure, retroactively making the series a little more diverse by making Voldemort’s pet snake a Korean woman this whole time is a decent idea in concept I guess, but not once you actually start to parse out the pieces of it or what it represents, not that any of that matters because the character has zero effect on the overall story and is just boring, disposable, and entirely unnecessary. And speaking of things being unnecessary, while I was happy to see him back since he’s the only fun character in either of these movies now, the return of Jacob and Queenie is not only totally random and brushed over in terms of what it would mean (breaking the rules of the last movie) to get there, it’s so bizarrely handled that one wonders what about the actual execution of it made it necessary for them to do it that way.
In fact, all of the characters are worse this time around. Newt used to be charming, but now he’s just a bumbling oaf with no convictions about anything, Tina’s annoying “mister Scamander” routine is back, and Alison Sudol (the best part of the last movie) looks like she dropped some acid right before every single take and they just filmed what happened after. Oh, and did I mention there’s a major twist at the end? Cause there is, and if you’ve been paying attention, it’s gonna piss you off too, because not only is it a complete betrayal of one of the universe’s most beloved characters, it never, not once, comes up in the part of these stories where it would have mattered in even the slightest bit.
Guys, Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald is bad, but only in the way a big budget blockbuster set in one of the most beloved movie universes of all time can be. Sure, there is one funny line, most of the performances work fine, and there are a few charming moments overall, but that doesn’t make much difference. It will have its defenders I’m sure, just as the Star Wars prequels do, and there are some interesting elements to it, but none of those elements add up to anything compelling, and when Rowling finally does get around to one compelling thing, it doesn’t matter and it betrays a character she wrote! It’s boring, dreary (the whole thing seemingly takes place at night or under cloud cover), it begs you so hard to take it seriously as “the dark one” that you just get annoyed, and it’s so stuffed full of exposition and backstory that doesn’t matter that I’m practically begging them to just stop the Hogwarts express here cause I wanna get off of it. If you’re ever browsing my movie shelf, don’t look for this one, cause it won’t be there. The magic is gone.
I’m giving “Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald” a 5/10.
