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

"I hate Paris."

-Gellert Grindelwald

Several months after the events of the first film, Gellert Grindelwald (Johnny Depp) manages to break out of custody while being transported to England.  Grindelwald makes his way to Paris to track down Credence Barebone (Ezra Miller), who is trying to find his birth mother.  Credence's reappearance draws the attention of most of the wizarding world and many different forces start tracking him down.  Albus Dumbledore (Jude Law) even sends Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne) to try and find Credence, but all of the different groups soon find themselves on a collision course playing right into Grindelwald's hands.

What Works:

Jude Law does an excellent job as the young Albus Dumbledore.  I totally bought him in the role and I love every scene he is in.  Unfortunately, Dumbledore is sidelined for most of the film and gets very little to do.  It makes sense in the context of the film however and I am looking forward to see more of Jude Law in the sequels.

Eddie Redmayne continues to be solid as our protagonist.  Redmayne is an excellent actor and gives Newt a bunch of quirks and interesting character traits.  His scenes with Law are especially good.

Finally, I like the story direction they took with Queenie Goldstein (Alison Sudol).  It doesn't always work, but the results in the 3rd act are actually pretty interesting and I'm interested to see how the other characters deal with Queenie's choice.

What Sucks:

There were way too many characters in this film and you could have cut out most of them.  They had virtually no role in how things played out.  Nagini (Claudia Kim), Yusuf (William Nadylam), and Nicolas (Brontis Jodorowsky) could have all been cut from the film and nothing would have changed.

Some of the other supporting characters aren't even well developed.  The relationship between Newt, his brother, Theseus (Callum Turner), and his fiancé, Leta (Zoë Kravitz) could have been really interesting, but the film doesn't explore it nearly enough.  Credence, who is the character at the center of all of this conflict, is painfully uninteresting.  Over the course of two films, we still don't have a single reason to care about this character or his quest to find out who he is.  Once again, he is pretty separate from the main characters and they get almost no chance to interact with him.  Why should I care about this character?  This movie does not have a good answer.

I hate it when sequels force relationship problems into the love stories established in the previous films.  It can work, but it has to be important to the plot and that is not the case here.  The stuff between Queenie and Jacob (Dan Folger) starts off interesting and ends interesting, but is very dull in the middle.  Even worse is the relationship issues between Newt and Tina (Katherine Waterston) which felt so forced and could have been resolved in seconds.  

For most of the movie, I was trying to figure out what was happening and why.  That's because we have a bunch of different side-plots that were moving at a snail's pace.  Everyone was pretty much waiting around for Credence to figure out who he is.  No story progress is made until the 3rd act.  Most of this film felt like filler or setup for the next movie.

Finally, the twist about Credence's identity is incredibly stupid and makes exactly zero sense with what we know from the book.  What makes it even worse is that J. K. Rowling wrote this script.  She should know that this doesn't work.  She wrote the books!  It's utterly baffling and one of the worst twists I've seen in some time.  This is how the movie ends and it left a bad taste in my mouth and very little excitement for the next film.

Verdict:

Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald is the worst movie in the Harry Potter franchise and it isn't remotely close.  This film is boring, stupid, stuffed with underdeveloped characters and pointless side-plots, and effectively killed any excitement I had for the series going forward.  Jude Law and Eddie Redmayne do a good job and I like the potential for Queenie's storyline going forward, but this movie is one of the most disappointing of the year.

 3/10: Really Bad