I could have gone to see the latest Fantastic Beasts movie when it hit theaters. I didn’t because it was just before Easter, COVID rates were starting to tick up a little, and I would be seeing elderly relatives within a week or so. It could wait. Besides, as much as the first movie in this prequel series was an unexpectedly delightful little movie, the second was such a bloated mess, a bloated mess that killed two infants in a family movie, that I wasn’t exactly psyched to see it anyway. Besides, with Warner Brothers’ current policy of dropping new releases onto HBO Max within 45 or so days, I figured I could just wait.
Well, it’s on HBO Max now, and I had a free evening.
Gellert Grindelwald (Mads Mikkelsen, the third actor in three movies to play this role) is up to something, and the one man who might best be able to stop him, Albus Dumbledore (Jude Law) is magically prevented from attacking his onetime love. However, Grindelwald’s people did something involving a Qlin, a magical creature with the power to both see into people’s souls and to see the future. Magical zoologist Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne) was present for that attempt and barely made it out alive. To that end, Dumbledore knows he needs to assemble a team to find out and defeat Grindelwald’s current scheme to bring war to the Muggles. To that end, he recruits Scamander, Scamaner’s assistant Bunty (Victoria Yeates), Scamander’s brother Theseus (Callum Turner), American charms professor Lally Hicks (Jessica Williams doing some kind of odd accent), French wizard Yusuf Kama (William Nadylam), and American Muggle and friend to Scamander Jacob Kowalski (Dan Fogler). Dumbledore can only give them an outline of a plan because Grindelwald will use the Qlin’s powers to see the future, so the group will probably have to improvise for the most part.
Whatever Grindelwald has planned, it involves the selection of the next Supreme Mugwump, some sort of Wizard President on an international scale. Oh, and that search takes the heroes to Germany to look into things because setting something in 1930s Germany isn’t subtle and there’s nothing subtle about the Wizarding World. Grindelwald’s plans seem to involve Credence Barebone (Ezra Miller), revealed at the end of the previous movie to be a member of the Dumbedore family, but also a magically unstable young man with a lot of power and little life left to use it. Can Dumbledore’s eclectic team possibly defeat a wizard whose forces outnumber them and who has a lot of power at his fingertips? To say nothing of the fact that Jacob’s love interest Queenie (Alison Sudol) sided with Grindelwald at the end of the previous movie?
Well, good news: this one is not the bloated mess that was The Crimes of Grindelwald. It’s also not a charming little side story like the first Fantastic Beasts movies that might have been better off as a stand-alone film. Instead, it’s just kinda there. J.K. Rowling, a much more controversial figure these days then when this prequel series started, had a co-writer on the script that I hope just kept it tighter. Jude Law is actually pretty charming in the role of Dumbedore, and quite frankly, I do wonder why Fogler’s Kowalski isn’t the lead character. He’s funny, and seeing the wizarding world entirely through the eyes of a Muggle might be very interesting. It’s obvious Rowling and the various protagonists think he’s a brave and charming man. Could he be the lead here? It could be Kowalski is best as a supporting character, but at this point, the lead character clearly isn’t Scamander, AKA the guy who is supposed to be the lead character since the series is named after a textbook he wrote.
And that may be the biggest issue I had here. Much of this movie deals with filling in the gaps of Dumbledore”s backstory, his relationship with Grindelwald, and maybe a bit on why he doesn’t get along with his brother Aberforth (Richard Coyle). Essentially, it’s here to say Dumbledore is a good guy and…not much else. And, didn’t I already know that? Any sort of shadows in Dumbledore’s backstory, such as what really happened to his late sister or how Credence is related to the Dumbledores, is more or less lightened. But is that interesting? For me, not particularly. I would think there’s a lot of possibly fascinating stories to be told in the Wizarding World that do not involve the faculty or students of Hogwarts. Maybe it might be nice to get one once in a while, especially since Rowling, long before her opinions on trans people came out, was already somewhat controversial in that she kept dropping more stuff about the world of Harry Potter long after the final book had been published, and now it’s like she has a whole series of movies to tell these stories that she felt had to be shoehorned into a series of books that got a lot of love once upon a time but that some people just can’t let go of. The big problem here is that person not letting go happens to be the author.
Grade: C
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