Fantastic Beasts - The Crimes of Grindelwald

The first “Fantastic Beasts” was a bit of a hodgepodge of a movie. Weaving a story out of the ephemera and backstory of the Harry Potter universe, it tried to combine a charming innocent-abroad-who-just-wants-to-look-after-his-animals story with a deep delving into the hidden backstories of the battles that had rocked the world of wizards before Voldemort came along. It wasn’t entirely successful, but fortunately most of the focus was on the befuddled charming zoologist and his cute beasties, not on the messy backstory, so it remained reasonably charming as it moved the locale from a vaguely contemporary England to 1920s New York and introduced a nice bunch of characters it was fun to spend time with.

The follow up, alas, doubles down on the messy backstory – while still keeping our befuddled charming zoologist and the cute beasties. And the backstory gets very very messy (and indeed, infects the charming zoologist and his friends, all of whom manage to get hit by the stupid stick a few times in order to manipulate them into various positions so that they can be, pointlessly, at odds for a lot of the film).  Eager to almost immediately invalidate the ending of the previous film (so a character who was presumed dead is now alive, and another character who was imprisoned is freed again), there’s a vast number of exposition dumps. There’s some nice costume and art design, but quite frequently we’re rushing past it so much that we can’t enjoy it properly (and the climax takes place in an ugly cellar).  The animal stuff is the one bit that still works, but at this point it’s like gluing the Crocodile Hunter onto the Simirillion – it all feels extremely messy. And by the end of the film, we still feel like everything’s barely got out of first gear – it’s still all preparation-for-battle rather than anything actually happening in this film. There’s a vast detour into irrelevant genealogy for characters who are only ever going to appear in this film and who amount to red herrings in the grand scheme of things. And under the dead weight of all this lore, nothing like an actually fun movie gets a chance to escape. So alas, this is a shemozzle. But with a couple of very cute animals.