So the new movie Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald is the first outright bad movie in the long running Harry Potter / Wizarding World series. *gasp* I know, right? Each mainline Harry Potter movie was varying levels of good while the first Fantastic Beasts had some merit and wasn’t terrible. Grindelwald is just bad…. and I think JK Rowling is to blame. *gasp*
The thing is, everyone except Rowling brought their A (or maybe B) game to this film. The actors showed up and read their lines well. The direction is pretty good. The technical aspects – the sets, the CGI, the lighting, etc. – are all good. The movie looks great – they put their money on screen. The worldbuilding and the locations are very good. But the story is a junk pile… a confusing, meandering, overstuffed, overplotted mess. One that Rowling scripted.
The very basic plot of the flick is that the evil Grindelwald – a kind of proto-Voldermort before Voldermort was Voldermort – has escaped during a prison transport from New York to London. Now he’s on the loose in Paris… with very evil plans, I assure you. Those plans revolve around pure blood wizards taking power and finding the random mystery boy from the first film who is important for… reasons. What are those reasons? Well, it’s a mystery… so for two movies, we’ve followed a bunch of wizards searching for, chasing, and fighting over a kid for some reason or another. Kind of hurts momentum when even the main characters don’t really know why they are doing what they are doing.
Speaking of characters, the film has 10-15 characters at any given time in four or five different plots and subplots. There’s so much mish-mash noise that it becomes hard to figure out who is doing what and why. I didn’t know why some people were doing what they were doing… and some of those confusing subplots turn out to be red herrings anyway and could have just been cut from the movie. One such subplot even drags the movie to a halt while we get an exposition dump about a family tree that doesn’t matter except that one of the characters in the Harry Potter movies has the same last name. But then, a minute later, someone else gives an alternate exposition dump that explains what REALLY happened in this family. And all this is besides the point of a movie called The Crimes of Grindelwad.
All this might be sufferable if it wasn’t so damn boring. People stand around and chatter at each other while pretty things happen around them… but the things they are saying don’t always makes sense or really propels whatever the main story is. I kept thinking in the theater, “Why is this happening? How am I this bored in a Harry Potter franchise movie? Who’s this guy? Am I supposed to remember him from the previous movies? Why are they introducing yet another character? Where are the characters from the first film anyway?”
Because, yeah, the four principal characters are in this film but often I’m not sure why. You put a gun to my head and I can’t tell you why Newt Scamander is in this movie. Yes, young hot Dumbledore has asked him to investigate what the bad guy is doing but I’m not sure why. The character doesn’t really care, actively says he doesn’t take sides, and has no particular talents of note. Besides fantastic beasts which are kind of an afterthought in this flick. The other three characters wander in and out of the plot and are often in the movie for hand-waving reasons in the first place. And one of this is a secret fascist because… ermm… look a three-headed monkey!
And speaking of fascists… Johnny Depp plays the evil Grindelwald when the movie remembers he’s in the movie. Honestly, for a movie called The Crimes of Grindelwald, about all he does is break out of prison and then his followers kill a toddler because, hey, this is a children’s movie! Hell, even the end sequence has Grindelwald giving a speech to a large crowd of wizards and the good guys kind of point out that listening to someone talk is not a crime. Shrug. Yeah… me too…
Though the funny thing about that speech is that it’s somehow the best part of the movie. When it decides to focus on the bad guy and let him speak with his oily, forked tongue, Depp is pretty compelling to watch. And finally the movie being set in 1929 makes a little bit of sense. But it’s all just set up for a third movie… one that might be good if they follow through with their plans. You might even call that movie Fantastic Beasts: The War Crimes of Grindelwald.
So, yeah, that’s a lot of words to layout an explanation of why this is somehow a terrible movie in the Harry Potter universe. You’d think with all the time and money the studios has put into the series over the year and gotten it generally right, they wouldn’t make a rookie mistake like this. But the thing is, JK Rowling is exclusively responsible for the script in these two movies, but she didn’t write them for the Harry Potter movies. I suspect her skill is and remains as an author of voluminous novels and not movie scripts. Different medium, different talents. I’d avoid this one… but if you are already in the Wizarding World net, you might see it anyway. And, hey, I hope you find your way to like it.
Score: 58