It's no secret that I
disliked the original Fantastic Beasts movie. The story was
underwhelming, the characters were flat, the dialog felt like it was
written by an English author who only had a passing knowledge of
America in general and probably thought we were all rubes to begin
with and, while it was never a terrible movie, it felt mostly
unnecessary to the Harry Potter franchise as a whole and to movies
specifically. How does Warner Brothers react to a movie with no real
new ideas and only the promise of flashy CGI and little substance? Do
they just cut their losses and run with the money (it was a box
office success)? Do they try excessive merchandising to pull a few
more dollars out of the movie before people realize it didn't really
have anything to say? Of course not! They make the stupid thing a
franchise!
Surprise! Creating a sequel
to an underwhelming movie yields worse returns (who knew?)! The
dialog is still just as flat as ever, the actual character of Newt
Scamander (Eddie Redmayne) is still just as uninteresting as before,
Johnny Depp remains the king of stunt casting as the titular
Grindelwald, the pacing is atrocious, the setting feels like
nostalgic blackmail (because of the whole Potterverse thing) and the
movie somehow destroys Dumbledore (Jude Law) with a completely new
canon. Throw in the fact that the movie negates Jacob's (Dan Fogler)
sacrifice (the BEST part of the original train wreck) from the
original movie in all of fifteen seconds (apparently, memory charms
are easy to overcome) and it makes me empathize with, of all things,
Voldemort's giant snake and you have something that's not only far
too scattershot for its own good but is slowly unmaking that which
even made Harry Potter special: there's just no charm here to speak
of.
As for good, Jacob is still
here and is still kind of fun as the pitiful schmuck of a human in a
world way over his head and it remains fun to watch him overreact to
things he doesn't understand. Say what you will about the rest of the
cast, the writing being a little to full of itself or the fact that
J.K. Rowling truly is nothing but a one trick pony in terms of
writing, she managed to make Jacob and, if he could have been
utilized a little better here, there might have been a saving grace
for this movie. Emphasis on “might”.
As for watching it, did you
see the entire Harry Potter series? Did it make you curious about
stuff that happened seventy years before the events of the books? Did
it make you want to learn more about Dumbledore than was already
provided in the last few books? Go for this and lose more interest in
the Wizarding World, I guess. Do you prefer to remember Harry Potter
as a better-than-average series of movies about a boy wizard and his
friends and their affinity for getting into trouble (usually
involving dark wizards)? Go back and watch those movies and store
this tripe somewhere far from your memories. You'll probably be
better for it.
David Yates (Tarzan)
finally does what no director has accomplished and makes Harry Potter
a terrible thing with Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, a
boring, full of itself rush job of a fantasy movie about a guy no one
on Earth cares about (Newt Scamander) trying to save the world from a
guy (Grindelwald) we all know fails if we saw any of the previous
eight Harry Potter movies. Did you read the books or see the Harry
Potter movies and wonder, “How did all that stuff happen seventy
years ago?” No? Good! Avoid this garbage.
My score 2/10. Goodbye,
Stan Lee. You made the word nerd cool before it was monetized, you
created a whole new culture around late-in-life popularity (life
begins at 80 for some people, apparently) and you were the rare
person to defeat the age-old phrase “The good die young”. You did
good, kid...
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