REVIEW: 'Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald' is a cynical chore
Johnny Depp and Poppy Corby-Tuech in Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, directed by David Yates.
Here’s an idea. Go to a site like Fandom or Pottermore, and spend a couple of hours scrolling through the pages, reading up on things like the early years of Albus Dumbledore or his protégé, Newt Scamander. Refresh your memory about the Elder Wand, and various other ephemera. And don’t worry about reading anything in order or keeping a bunch of tabs open, because you’re pretty much getting the same experience as the new Fantastic Beasts movie; you can even listen to a podcast while you do it.
The newest film from the Harry Potter universe - or the Wizarding World, as a title card helpfully identifies it – is a scattershot, info-dump of a film, a series of trailer-like scenes glued into a movie. It seems shrewdly designed to download random bits of wizarding mythology to its fans, stringing along plot revelations to compel viewers to see the next three planned sequels in a five-film series. It even tries to reflect some of its screenwriter’s political activity, though with about as much depth as a tweet. It feels like the kind of thing that Rowling’s own characters would dismiss as Muggle foolishness.
The story picks up six months after the events of the first film. Gellert Grindelwald (Johnny Depp), a powerful Dark Wizard, has escaped captivity in 1927’s New York and is heading to Europe to promote his vision of a world where wizards rule over all non-magical populations. The natural opponent to Grindelwald is none other than Dumbledore (Jude Law), but Dumbledore refuses to fight his one-time friend.
Dan Fogler as Jacob and Eddie Redmayne as Newt.
Instead, he secretly sends the hero of the first film, Newt (Eddie Redmayne) to Paris to investigate, against the wishes of the Ministry of Magic. Dumbledore and others suspect that Grindelwald is not only gathering supporters for his cause, but targeting a specific recruit: Creedence Barebone (Ezra Miller), a misunderstood young man who harbours an Obscurus, or unstable magical force. Cue the expected race against time to find Creedence, stop Grindelwald, and maybe cross paths with some of those titular beasts along the way.
And there are yet more characters, plot threads, and exhausting amounts of detail, enough to turn a review into pure synopsis. There’s a scene just prior to the climax where a stupid number of characters all find themselves in a mausoleum and proceed to talk for what feels like 20 minutes about wizarding family trees - when moments earlier, one of the characters was poised to kill another. This kind of stuff may work in a YA novel, but it shows how Rowling is still getting used to the intricacies of writing for the screen.
The movie is constantly stopping dead in its tracks to flip between five or six threads, some of which are merely vehicles to show off some fan-service character like Nicolas Flamel (Brontis Jodorowsky) or a young version of Professor McGonagall (Fiona Glascott). This means that when the big climax finally arrives, crucial decisions by characters are poorly justified, and carry no more weight than the self-propelled feather Newt chases across Paris at one point.
Chief among these moments is when one character decides to join up with Grindelwald. Rowling is not too subtly hinting that this is the wizarding version of a family member proudly purchasing a Make America Great Again hat. But Rowling can’t be bothered to tell us whether the character was legitimately persuaded by the villain, or merely under some enchantment. Flimsy political references like this just make the whole film harder to swallow: it amounts to an extra dose of slacktivism on top of the shareholder-pleasing product we’re consuming.
Jude Law as “Sexy Dumbledore”
While we’re talking about the bad guy, some words about Johnny Depp. The actor’s casting in the film was already a mini-controversy some months ago, with a subset of fans incensed that Rowling would stand behind an actor with Depp’s past of abuse allegations. Depp’s personal life aside, he brings nothing to the role that another actor couldn’t enhance. He plays Grindelwald like a pastiche of the many other pale-faced, oddly-dressed weirdos he’s portrayed over the years. His presence in the film only reconfirms that he has bills to pay, and Warner Bros. still puts some value in the name recognition he somehow commands.
Is the new film bad enough to prompt a “Dark Universe”-style bucket of cold water on the studio’s plans? Much as I might wish for it, it’s unlikely. The Universal monster brand doesn’t hold a levitating candle to Pottermania (or whatever the fandom is called as it grows beyond the Potter character). It will take a lot to turn the audience away; as Marvel proved, these days you can get away with movies like Thor: The Dark World if you already have a roadmap to Thor: Ragnarok in place. Can I skip ahead to Fantastic Beasts: Grindelwald Tweets About The Russia Investigation?
Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald gets two stars out of four.
Stray thoughts
I’m sure the plot makes more sense on a second or third viewing, but who’s got that kind of time?
Why didn’t Dumbledore just tell the Ministry that Grindelwald had that blood pact jewel thingy?
The sequence at the end with the blue fiery dragon spell was 1500% more confusing than it needed to be.