It's about 5 years since the Harry Potter series wound up, and in these new franchise-happy days, that means it's time to give it a bit of a thump-along. So "Fantastic Beasts" is along to tell new stories in the same world of secretive magicians and witches, this one with a largely adult cast and a move sideways and back in time to 1920s New York.
It's a fairly basic setup - a travelling beast-collecting wizard arrives in New York and a few of his creatures escape, meanwhile a larger beastly menace is threatening to shatter the secret that keeps the magic world safe from the rampaging humans. But given JK Rowling's usual adept handling of plot and character, lightly painting a deep and complex world with just a couple of gestures, it's quite an easy film to take. And the emphasis on magical creatures means that there's a whole lot of adorably strange animals to watch.
The humans are mostly not too bad either. Eddie Redmayne has often been an actor I've found wandering between hammy and precious, but he hits a good sweet spot here as the mildly inwardly-focussed Newt. Katherine Waterston as his primary American offsider has a good tightly-wound personality. Dan Fogler as the token regular-human is basically there to receive exposition, but he functions as a sympathetic regular-guy at the same time. Colin Farrell is his usual self when he has an American accent, which is to say, middling (he's much better when Irish).
This works better as a standalone film than it does as a setup for a brand new five-film series (the "bigger picture" stuff is a tad awkward, and as usual the magical-government stuff wanders between wildly incompetent and actively unpleasant) but as a standalone film it's quite enterntaining.
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