3 outta 5

*** outta *****

One may need at least a minor degree in Harry Potter Wizarding World lore for Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald to have dramatic satisfaction.  This is the second installment of a planned five movie Harry Potter prequel series and it doesn’t have the new zippiness like Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them did two years ago. The main character of Newt is sort of sidelined in his own film making this an ensemble flick with a meandering plotline. Still, there is some very cool stuff here as screenwriter and Potter novelist J.K. Rowling fleshes out the backstory of the world and adds some neat twists that upend Potter beliefs. It’s a fun movie but it is the first in the ten movie Potter series that feels like a middle piece instead of individually satisfying. But even if its pacing is kind of slow it still has magicians, magic, monsters and plenty of evil monologues.

Set in 1920s, the evil wizard Grindelwald (Johnny Depp) has escaped from custody and is building an army. Grindelwald is searching for a powerful young man named Credence (Ezra Miller) who is a ball of uncontrolled magical rage. Tasked to hunt down Credence is the wizard creature expert Newt (Eddie Redmayne) with the help of his brother Theseus (Callum Turner). Their relationship is frosty, more so now that Theseus is engaged to Newt’s old flame, Leta (Zoe Kravitz). Newt ends meeting his old friends, Tina (Katherine Waterson), Queenie (Alison Sudol) and the non-magical human Jacob (Dan Fogler) on his quest. Newt is sent to Paris by his former teacher at Hogwarts and great wizard Albus Dumbledore (Jude Law) who has a complicated personal history with the evil Grindelwald. 

There is a flashback to young Newt and young Leta at Hogwarts school that attempts to sets up Newt and Leta’s emotional turmoil as the centerpiece of the film. The thing about the flashbacks in the Potter series is they are predominantly delivered by magic for old secrets which made them compelling. But this just ends up as another subplot in a movie overstuffed with subplots. There is supposed to be a love triangle between her and Newt and his brother, but it never amounts to much.

The main quartet of Newt, Queenie, Tina and Jacob that led the first film doesn’t get much to do this time. Redmayne’s Newt is mostly a gaggle of tics and mumbling who only becomes less of a drag when he lights up while interacting with magical creatures which really doesn’t happen a lot in this movie. Waterson’s Tina who was a huge part of the first film just sort of tags along and Fogler, a really funny performer, disappears for long stretches. Even Sudol’s Queenie goes through an entire emotionally changing huge arc that basically happens almost entirely off screen.

This movie is much more interested in the powerful magic users Credence, Dumbledore and Grindelwald. All three of those performers are great. Miller’s Credence spends a lot of the time looking downcast but he puts lots of different layers to it. Law’s Dumbledore is fantastic, his introductory scene where he enlists Newt is magically quirky which is what Dumbledore should be. Some of the movie’s best stuff simply involves brief scenes of Dumbledore teaching random students at Hogwarts, however that is a cheap, easy move by basically replicating the best teaching moments from the Potter series. Depp is the biggest, newest addition to the series and he plays Grindelwald a coiled spring of strange magic energy. His breakout scene that opens the movie is legit fantastic although after he does spend a chunk of the film stuck at home base saying vaguely nefarious things. The movie’s big climax involves Depp doing a awesome monologue about how choice, belief and magic all intertwine. Also he has one of the best, random aside as while chaos is reigning down around him he bitterly mutters “I hate Paris”.    

The Potter series has always had hard tonal gearshifts as the first film jumped between murder and gags about sweets. However, Crimes is probably the biggest tonal jumping between quirky and extremely dark as the movie early on has a bleak moment with evil magic users and a toddler and then cuts right to Dumbledore’s funny introduction. Overall a lot of the movie is waiting for Grindelwald to show up at the climax but the VFX and score makes it all very sweeping. There is a cool twist that the snake that the evil wizard Voldemort hangs with 70 years later is actually a person, Nagini (Claudia Kim).  Although, somewhat problematically, she seems nice which makes it hard to root for the Potter characters in the future movies to kill her as the evil snake.

Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald is a dutiful installment in franchise extension. It still has magical moments, although a lot of the newness of the powers are wearing off which instead makes it rely upon revelatory twists. These twists may tick off some Potter purists but it does show that Rowling is willing to flip things around for a compelling story. Here’s hoping the next one feels less like moving narrative pieces around and will instead be a complete experience.