2018 Film Review: Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald (2018)

Directed by: David Yates
Written by: J.K. Rowling
Starring: Eddie Redmayne, Katherine Waterson, Johnny Depp
IMDb Link

The Crimes of Grindelwald manages to combine everything bad about prequels with everything bad about cinematic universes, telling us a story that serves as little more than preamble to an actual story that is itself a foregone conclusion. Not much of what happens matters to the story being told, and what little does is awfully contrived.

This whole story is like three different plots with ties to Harry Potter lore, all wrapped up in convoluted claptrap that nullifies every significant outcome of the last movie. Dark wizard Grindelwald (Depp) escapes custody, and he wants wizard-kind to rule over muggles, but he can't do it completely because a magic blood pact he made as a kid prevents him from attacking Dumbledore (Jude Law), so he has to convince Credence Barebone (Ezra Miller, surviving his apparent death in the last movie) to do it, because apparently his Obscurial powers make him powerful enough to match Dumbledore. Meanwhile, Dumbledore can't attack Grindelwald for the same reason, so he sends Newt Scamander (Redmayne) to try and apprehend Credence before Grindelwald can get to him. Meanwhile, Tina Goldstein (Waterson) is sent to Paris to look for and kill Credence, and her sister Queenie (Alison Sudol) and muggle Jacob Kowalski (Dan Fogler) get involved through a series of reveals about Jacob not actually having his memory properly erased and some barely-examined drama between the two them about muggle and wizards not being able to get married in America. There's also yet another person looking for Credence for reasons too time-consuming to reveal here, and a subplot about Newt's childhood friend Leta Lestrange (Zoe Kravitz) that involves her long-dead half-brother. If this sounds like a lot of unnecessary detail, then you understand the film's biggest problem.

The movie is so filled with plots and subplots that have tenuous connection at best and are all fighting each other for screen-time. No individual idea is really bad, but the movie forces itself through each one as quickly as possible just so that it can tell every one, so nothing the film does has any impact and you're left with no time to care or think. Things just happen in this movie, jarringly jumping between every plot and subplot with no sense of rhythm or pace. Additionally, some of the subplots require numerous bloated flashbacks that have little to no bearing on the plot, and some of the others don't actually go anywhere and are mostly just set-up for the next movie. Queenie and Jacob are unceremoniously forced back in to the movie because they were the best characters from the last one, but then they have nothing to actually do outside of their own melodrama, so most of the time they're nothing more than a distraction that drags their characters through the mud. Tina and Newt had a massive reset on their relationship because of some misunderstanding in a magazine, and they don't even develop properly from that because what little screen-time they have together is spent watching the plot happen or getting that sit-com mishap sorted. Leta's personal backstory is actually interesting, but it's wrapped up in some of the most contrived family bloodline drama that is itself just a red herring to haphazardly toy with the prophecy trope and set-up a twist that goes nowhere because it's just more set-up for the next movie. Half the characters in this film could have been cut, and nothing would have changed about the main story of this film.

This abysmal writing could have been forgivable if the movie really looked good, but even from the start the action is almost unwatchable for how incoherent it all is, and when you can actually see what's going on the action itself is nothing but pointless noise and flash that feels like the start of movie, not its climax. The only aspects of the film that I can give praise to are some of the performances and a brief return to Newt's menagerie. Depp is cold and oily yet charismatic as Grindelwald, a good visage for a villain who pretends to be deeper in his motivations than he actually is, Law is charmingly mischievous as young Dumbledore, Redmayne still pulls Newt with appropriate discomfort, and Kravitz gives such real weight and emotion to Lestrange that I almost cared about a character who simply didn't matter. Likewise, Newt's menagerie is still the best thing about these movies, filled with charm and imagination and life otherwise absent from the movie, and it's quickly left in the dust as the plot charges forward with its all too self-serious nonsense.

The Short Version: The Crimes of Grindelwald is a contrived mess of incoherent and meaningless action sequences, jarring comedy beats, and dull, self-serious sequences of people standing around talking about nothing. It's the kind of terrible franchise-bait that has no interest in telling its own story and haphazardly sets up twists that it doesn't intend to address until the next one. Don't bother.

Rating: 3/10

Published November 18th, 2018