So, after witnessing the monstrosity that is Crimes of Grindelwald, I can clearly state JK Rowling isn’t half as good a screenwriter as she is a novelist. While its nice of her to at least try, that didn’t make my experience of this infuriatingly boring and confusing stain on the wizarding world any more tolerable. Before I dig into my thoughts on the sequel to the surprisingly good first Fantastic Beasts film, I must first say that this is the first film in all my seventeen years of living I’ve ever walked out from early, so if by a very unlikely miracle it drastically improved after the 1 hour 20 mark, you can punch me through my laptop screen.
The plot can pretty much be summed up by an evil wizard called Grindelwald breaking loose from wizard prison and the bumbling protagonist Newt being sent to take him out to restore his travel rights. That’s basically it beside the incoherency conjured with loosely-tied subplots and over-saturation of useless characters. Oh, and Dumbledore’s in it too. And he’s not nearly as utilised as he could’ve been outside some basic fan-service, a shame really, given he’s played pretty well by Jude Law.
What made the first Fantastic Beasts work for me was the careful pacing it had with uncovering the nature of Newt’s loose beasts to connect with its manageable amount of characters while simultaneously hyping up the graver, more important plot with an equal balanced focus. Here, almost none of the scenes are intertwined well, making the pacing absolutely non-existent as well as the cast of characters being nearly twice that of a Game of Thrones marathon certainly not helping the entertainment (or staying-awake) factor.
Johnny Depp plays, would you believe, another cardboard-cut-out super-ultra-evil-force-of-total-destruction villain who tries make up for the unoriginality of his boring cold-hearted trickster act with an embarrassing crazy hairdo and comes off feeling like a slytherin parody of Chigurh from No Country for Old Men. What doesn’t help his inexcusably cookie-cutter villain act is the horrendously unfitting nutcracker background music that lurked in every scene that didn’t include any loud magical explosions, which hampered any originality of the more smaller-scaled intense parts that try to prove how ‘scary’ and ‘manipulative’ Johnny Depp’s villain is and instead made my eyelids a little heavier, feeling like they were solely trying to flow into a big upcoming event that I kept questioning myself why I should care about with such an abysmal overflow of underdeveloped characters.
There are also returning characters that fit neatly into the plot of the first but feel like rather embarrassing inconveniences in this one. The whole meaning of Jacob’s character in Where to Find Them was that he was an everyday muggle thrown into the bizarre and surreal wizarding world, almost completely shot from his perspective to show the amusing contrast between these realities and, therefore, made you all the more captivated with both his character’s development and the possibilities of this strange world and Newt’s beasts (yes, that film actually earned that title). Here, it so happens he was magically (not fittingly, just lazily conveniently) saved from a memory-wipe and is now nothing but a comic-relief buddy with the depth of a sheet of paper. Another example is the Munroe-imitating Queenie’s agonisingly unfitting dumb-blonde displays that gave the original a sort of cheap comedic charm with Jacob’s first experiences of the magic world and here just feels like a stereotypical misfit that would’ve broken the film’s mood if there was a coherent one to begin with.
This is all part of what kills the film: it felt like two hundred characters being squeezed in like lemons into a thimble, and disturbingly unengaging ones at that. Right from the start with Johnny Depp’s confusing jailbreak leaving me dumbfounded to who I should be following and who’s just a support before I just gave up end embraced the despair. Not since Tony Jaa’s Warrior King have I ever seen so many coming-going characters passing like a seriously bad NDE, leaving me in its dust to just what the plot is other than the ‘stop the evil baddie with the crazy hair’ gimmick.
But the charm of Harry Potter is not just the characters, but the visual effects too. I’m rather sorry to say that the Doctor Strange-inspired computer animations had even me surprised by how unengaging and boring it all felt, with every little transformation and magical explosion desperately trying to seem original but instead felt like it belonged way back in the early 2000s Potter films. Not only that, but the camera pans as though to attempt to give those seeing in 3D their money’s worth by hurtling your vision around these reforming buildings or fast-travelling monsters that just gave me a throbbing eyesore.
One other thing that left me dumbfounded was the terrible title. While it’s obvious the film is anything but fantastic, where’s the beasts? Sure, you may see a plushie-selling mole thing or jolly green stick insect thing here and there but if that’s enough to sum up all this subplot-plagued, character-intertying bullshit as, you might as well be calling Whiplash ‘the breakup’ or American Psycho ‘business card roulette’.
Crimes of Grindelwald is undoubtably one of the most intensely uninteresting and mindlessly incoherent productions I’ve seen to date on the big screen. The characters are lifeless, the settings change too fast, the plots mesh into a distasteful broth, the effects are substandard and it all just tries too hard to connect to the previous Harry Potter world than forming its own unique formulae. Even the most hardcore Potter fans would probably want to turn a blind eye to this bore-fest, or at least the parts I actually stayed to watch or even care about when seeing it. So, Rowling, a little word of advice: please stick to novels for the good of us all. Ta.