There are a lot of interesting things going on in Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald. It's just that none of them manage to turn it into an interesting movie. It's been pointed out by more than one reviewer that this is a bridging movie in the Fantastic Beasts series, a film that is mostly setting things up for what is to come. That's clearly true; it's just that it fails to provide a reason why anyone would want more of this incoherent wand-waving.
But we all know why we'll be back. The Harry Potter franchise has built up such massive reserves of goodwill that seemingly nothing - not social media turning on creator J.K. Rowling, not films that are nothing more than blatant cash-grabs, not continuing Harry Potter's story only as a massively expensive stage play - can dissuade the fans. The fact that about 80% of Harry Potter's appeal was that it was a fantasy version of an already romanticised version of high school and Crimes of Grindelwald is a nightmare tale of the worst kind of adulthood doesn't matter; throw in a few brightly coloured scarves and a wand or two and the fans will keep on coming back.
When you're a child in the world of Harry Potter, magic is a gateway to an amazing world full of endless surprises and delights. When you're an adult, you get three shit jobs to choose from - magic cop, magic teacher or magic bureaucrat - and your every waking moment is obsessed with politics involving extremist forces that are constantly gathering and demanding the overthrow of everything the old order stands for. Considering the old order mainly stands for those three crappy jobs, it's not hard to see the appeal of Magic Hitler and his generic cronies.
There's barely a story here. Grindelwald (Johnny Depp, remarkably restrained for late-period Depp and perhaps the best human thing in this film) escapes from magic prison while being transferred back to Europe, hides out in Paris, marshals his forces and eventually gives a rally that is a relatively reasonable and low-key political affair in the Age of Trump. That's one of this film's handful of interesting ideas: Magic Hitler is portrayed as a charismatic and reasonable fellow with a vision that is at least superficially attractive. It's a good thing he signs off on baby-killing in private otherwise it'd be hard to see why he was the bad guy at all.
Everyone from the first film is back plus more, but while they're all extremely busy sadly nothing they do has anything to do with what this film is really about, which is sorting everyone into two sides (well, three - not everyone makes it to the end credits) for the conflict that is to come. Dumbledore (Jude Law) pulls a few strings behind the scenes, but for a film where the only person who can stop Magic Hitler is a much-loved high school teacher this takes itself way too seriously across the board, from the plodding pace and murky colour palette to the collection of doomed relationships and Grindelwald's boringly reasonable evil. Shouldn't magic be more fun?
Previous Harry Potter films always had a good reason for non-fans to stop by and take a look; even the first Fantastic Beasts had a lot of, you know, fantastic beasts. But this is fan service pure and simple, aimed solely at those who'll get worked up by a "canon-breaking" shock twist, and even the brief hints that one of the subplots involving a young powerful wizard (Ezra Miller) searching for his missing past might be a twisted version of the story of one Harry Potter go nowhere. If you want to watch later movies in this series, you'll have to watch this one; beyond that, there's no reason to watch this.
- Anthony Morris
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