"The Crimes of Grindelwald," the second of the "Fantastic Beasts" films, is rather messily plotted and there are annoying little inconsistencies and contrivances everywhere you look. And yet, I found myself really enjoying the worldbuilding and the characters, particularly the new additions. Eddie Redmayne returns as the creature collecting wizard Newt Scamander, who is sent by his mentor Dumbledore (Jude Law) to Paris, in order to hunt down the unstable Credence Barebone (Ezra Miller) before he can be recruited by the evil, human-hating Grindelwald (Johnny Depp). This involves getting the original gang from the first movie back together: Tina (Katherine Waterston), Queenie (Alison Sudol) and Jacob (Dan Fogler). Newt also spends a good deal of time avoiding his older brother Theseus (Callum Turner) and future sister-in-law Leta (Zoe Kravitz), who Newt has feelings for, as they're also on Grindelwald's trail.
This isn't what the movie is actually about, however. "Crimes" is the installment of the series that reveals that "Fantastic Beasts" is really a "Harry Potter" prequel series about the clash between Dumbledore and Grindelwald. Newt stays at the forefront of the story, but he's quickly becoming a bit player next to the increasingly powerful Credence, whose investigation into his mysterious parentage takes up a huge chunk of the narrative, and even Queenie, the mind-reader whose frustrations with wizarding world law put her on a dangerous path. Sure, Newt learns that he has to take sides in the oncoming battle, and patches up a misunderstanding with Tina, but next to Leta exorcising some potent inner demons, and Grindelwald's Hitler-like rise to power, Newt's material is pretty tepid stuff.
I'm not surprised that the audience and critical reaction to "Crimes of Grindelwald" has been cool. Like so many recent blockbusters, this one suffers for being an obvious connector piece for other installments of its franchise, and rushing through way too much story too fast. It's hardly a crowd-pleaser, with a gloomier and more serious mood, plus glimpses of an oncoming war and serious childhood traumas. I'm not sure that Rowling die-hards are going to be all that happy with it either. Even though I'm not remotely a hardcore "Potter" fan, it was difficult to ignore that Rowling essentially walked back a good deal of the ending of the first "Fantastic Beasts" in order to get certain characters where she needed them to be for this movie. At the same time, I appreciate that the film is so doggedly concerned with advancing its story, that it doesn't bother with a lot of the little bits of "Potter" formula that I've come to expect. Even references and callbacks are fairly short and to the the point.
A big part of the appeal of "Fantastic Beasts" for me is the production design, full of immaculately costumed characters and storybook locales. David Yates does a fine job of conjuring gloomy cityscapes with touches of magic here and there. Action sequences and "fantastic beasts" are noticeably fewer this time around, but the ones that remain are still fine spectacle. The performances are decent all around, but the standouts are the bigger names. Johnny Depp's offscreen antics have been deplorable lately, but he makes a very watchable onscreen megalomaniac. I find Grindelwald far more interesting and entertaining than Voldemort. Jude Law doesn't have many scenes here, but he's intriguing enough as the younger Dumbledore that I look forward to the future showdown with Depp.
"Fantastic Beasts" has a lot of problems as a series, but its core components are strong. And I expect those will allow it to bumble along through another movie or two before reaching a satisfactory confusion. And if we're lucky, there will be some good CGI battles, and Depp and Law will get to ham it up in fancy costumes, and Katherine Waterston will get to make an expression other than worried or determined. Frankly, that's more than some other fantasy franchises are offering these days.
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