Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald (David Yates)

[Henry Gale]

IMDb (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4123430/) / Wiki (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantastic_Beasts:_The_Crimes_o f_Grindelwald)

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[Henry Gale]

As someone who wasn't even a fan of the first one, my goodwill towards the Potter-side of the universe and being able to see this for free brought me to it, but in the end it's just a very slick, and even fairly compelling spectacle that kept me involved until it was arriving at a climax that reminded me, "Oh right, they're looking to make three more of these.." where it then doesn't give up anything resembling a proper finale of a film, or even a resonant-enough ending of a chapter of a more enticing larger story.

More thoughts later (assuming I've even retained enough memory of it all in the coming days), but it's basically both as visually and atmospherically impressive as you might be curious it could be at times, while also being as clunkily plotted and generally insignificant as you fear by its end. Needless to say I don't think I'll care how this may all end by the time it's done in 2024(??)

Oh, and towards the end, this movie has Grindelwald smoking a skull hookah and what he exhales creates a projection of a future with WWII, Nazis, and atom bombs, and imploring wizards that they are going to have to stop it, and it's still boring.

[Philip J. Fry]

As a HP and Fantastic Beasts' fan I'll say this:

Queenie overdosed on dummy pills.
McGonnagall is a vampire.
There's something about a baby and it's super dumb.
Credence is a Dumbledore. It is very dumb.
Nagini was not needed here. She felt wasted.
The new characters just aren't fleshed out nor interesting at all.
This movie is super disjointed.

Man, this was disappointing. Bad movie.

[Peng]

Seeing this out of dutiful Potterhead obligation (long story but: the books literally shaped my life, leading me to reading, cinephilia, and language skill that opens several life opportunities for me), but though not good, this is not as terrible as I expected. Maybe it's the texture of this world that still remains appealing to me, while Jude Law joins Dan Fogler and Alison Sudel as supporting cast who help liven up the film considerably (even as Sudel's arc is sloppily executed).

But this really does feel like overeagerly plotted, convoluted and expensive fan fiction, where Rowling takes what might be sideplots in the margin of one of her books, and makes it the main plots together at the same time in the screenplay, cramming them together as to be incoherent. Her and Yates' worst Crime though is this magical world's internal logic/rule; there are very slight traces of this in Yates' HP adaptations, and it grows much stronger in the first FB film, but finally comes home to roost here: the suspension of disbelief in its portrayal is so inefficiently done that the magic now feels random, deus ex machina-ly more than half the time. And Redmayne remains a tics-ridden, charisma blackhole in these things. 5/10

[Rico]

The first Fantastic Beasts movie had it's problems, but at least it had joy. This completely lacked joy.