MOVIE REVIEW: Fantastic Beasts - The Crimes Of Grindelwald
(The Great River - Howard Shore)
I am not a huge Harry Potter fan. I've never been shy about that fact, or the reasons why. I tried to read the books, but couldn't make it past 'Harry Potter and The Summer Of Bitching'. I think it was called 'Order Of The Phoenix' over here in the U.S, but I could be wrong about that.
Anyway, my distaste at J.K. Rowling's continued shaking of the money tree aside, I confessed to pleasant surprise when the first Fantastic Beasts came out. You can read my original review here, and it might be a good idea to do so since I'll be referencing it a time or two in the coming paragraphs.
Two years later, the sequel is finally here. Is there any way that this movie could be as good as the first? Could Rowling have actually done it again?
THE SHORT VERSION:
Uh...no, actually. And that's a damn shame if things are falling apart in the second of what's supposed to be FIVE BLOODY MOVIES.
THE LONG VERSION:
In true IDOTAM fashion, I'm going to tell you up front that I enjoyed this movie a great deal, and then spend the rest of this article tearing it apart, so...you've been warned.
To paraphrase the great James May, Rowling and her contributors had all of the ingredients to make an amazing shepherd's pie, and they went and used dog meat. This movie had all of the elements it needed to be, start to finish, a truly amazing sequel:
- The setup from the first movie was excellent!
- The returning characters are all excellent!
- The use of fantastic beasts is excellent!
- The universe, that whole grown-up Potterverse thing is excellent!
They still managed to cock it up, and they did it in a way that's rather...un-Potterish, actually. The one, single thing that this movie really suffers from is a ham-fisted, overly complicated story. With the exception of a few items -- I'm looking at you, Horcruxes -- Rowling's previous stories have been relatively straight forward. While they aren't without their twists, the twists are usually in excellent service to the story. That's...completely not what's going on here. There are so many different things going on at once in this movie that you lose track of almost everything. The movie feels disjointed and haphazzard, and some of the storytelling is just plain lazy. Several key plot points in this movie almost directly contrast with events from the first film, and all viewers are offered to try and make sense of things are a few very sloppy lines of dialogue before the scene is hurried along. Finally, the extent to which this film leans on coincidences for major plot points is insulting, culminating in the biggest, most "Wait, what the FUCK?" moment in the film's last 30 seconds that you're likely to have experienced in recent memory.
Fortunately, for all of the badness that the story brings to the movie, there are several characters on hand that not only keep it from being bad, but somehow also manage to make the movie quite entertaining. Chief among them is the film's protagonist. Eddie Redmayne's Newt Scamander is, every single second that he's on screen, perfect. Newt may be the most fully realized character in any of the Harry Potter films, and that includes Harry himself. Add to that his inherent link to the movie's many magical creatures, and you can't help but love every moment he's on screen. Some of the best parts of the movie revolve around watching Newt care for his menagerie of critters. If the cinematic equivalent of 'feeding the pets' is this entertaining, you know something's being done properly.
Returning for a much larger role in this film is Johnny Depp's Grindelwald, and while this will probably get me stoned by Potterheads everywhere, I will stand by my feeling that he is a FAR better villain than Voldemort ever was. He's smarter, he's more charismatic, he's more sinister, he's just...MORE EVIL. Voldemort always felt like weak tea to me. Bellatrix LeStrange was a much scarier villain -- all credit to the amazing Helena Bonham-Carter -- and it was easier to hate Lucious Malfoy, yet...Voldemort was in charge? This isn't the case with Grindelwald. You know precisely why he's the Big Bad in this film. There's nothing particularly creative about his methods, but sometimes, the old ways are best, and Depp carries it all off perfectly without any of the customary vamping that he tends to resort to in some of his other films.
There are a host of other characters at play in the film as well, some returning and some new, but they're all almost completely unremarkable because of how the story handles them. The two exceptions to this blandness are Jacob and Queenie. Their presence is notable for entirely bad reasons.
I'll start with Dan Fogler's Everyman, Jacob Kowalski. Fogler tries SO DAMN HARD to bring back some of the excellence that he showed in the first movie, but the story just won't let him. He spends half of this film being a sage to Newt and the other half of the film being a moron of such a high caliber that it feels out of character for him.
And then there's poor Queenie. Allison Sudol's mind-reading gal from New York is given such a bad road to walk in this movie that I felt really, really awful for her. The extent to which her character is turned into an absolute waste of oxygen is heart-breaking. I'm seriously stunned that Rowling would have written her off in this fashion, especially given how pivotal she was to the first film's most emotional moments. I'll touch more on her in the spoilers section.
And actually, now that I'm thinking about it, Tina gets written like garbage in this movie too. I'm not sure what Rowling was smoking when she was writing the female characters in this movie, but the next time someone whinges about men writing women poorly, I'm going to point them at this movie and wait patiently. Tina and Queenie were both really excellent, seriously contributory characters to the first film, and ... well, less so in this one.
The Crimes Of Grindelwald has no right to have been as entertaining as it was -- and make no mistake, it was very entertaining. Redmayne and Depp carry almost the entire film on their shoulders, aided more than once by the critters in Newt's suitcase, but there's no denying that this world deserves better than Rowling is giving it.
HERE THERE BE SPOILERS! WANDS AT THE READY?
- Okay, fucking seriously with the Love charm? In what way is that not one small step away from the Imperio curse, one of the so-called Unforgivable Curses? I mean WHAT THE FUCK? Queenie, of all people?? And the casual nature with which Newt handles that situation instead of rightfully telling her that she's kind of a monster for doing that to ANYONE, let alone someone she supposedly cared about, and...and....AUGH! And while we're on this topic...
- Seriously, how do you take a wonderful character like Queenie and turn her into a shallow, manipulative, dangerously impulsive, easily swayed lunatic like that?? This is the 21st fucking century! Can we not write women -- hell, ANYONE! -- like this anymore please? There are so many other things that could have been done to move the story forward without leaning on a wagonload full of this kind of trope-ish bullshit.... I really hope that I missed something huge and I'm flying off the handle about this without reason. Someone, PLEASE tell me that's the case here.
- Ghostbusters, much? First with the giant Cat Dragon thing and then again with the blue flaming dragons?? And on that note...
- Dear people who wanted blue flame dragons, we regret to inform you that Game Of Thrones did that shit way better.
- Fuck all of the other people who got turned to ash during the blue flame extravaganza, when the Niffler crawled out of the ruins all singed and smokey, I was legitimately concerned that the movie was going to kill the poor dear. That, right there, was the only seriously emotional point in the whole film for me.
- BABY NIFFLERS.
- Can we talk about Newt's adorable, but painfully stereotyped ginger assistant for a moment? Okay, moment's over.
- How fucking stupid is it that Tina somehow thinks shy, sweet Newt would hook up with Lete LeStrange -and- get engaged so quickly? Given how the first movie ended, and given that this one starts off a few MONTHS later, not years, she never thought to write Newt a letter? Place a phone call? Send a bloody owl? Do ANYTHING other than make a stupid assumption that in NO WAY fits the man she spent the entire first movie getting to know?! SLOPPY FUCKING STORYTELLING!
Ugh. The more I think about how sloppy the story was and how poorly some of the characters were written, the more I want to be done writing this review.
So I'm done.
I am not a huge Harry Potter fan. I've never been shy about that fact, or the reasons why. I tried to read the books, but couldn't make it past 'Harry Potter and The Summer Of Bitching'. I think it was called 'Order Of The Phoenix' over here in the U.S, but I could be wrong about that.
Anyway, my distaste at J.K. Rowling's continued shaking of the money tree aside, I confessed to pleasant surprise when the first Fantastic Beasts came out. You can read my original review here, and it might be a good idea to do so since I'll be referencing it a time or two in the coming paragraphs.
Two years later, the sequel is finally here. Is there any way that this movie could be as good as the first? Could Rowling have actually done it again?
THE SHORT VERSION:
Uh...no, actually. And that's a damn shame if things are falling apart in the second of what's supposed to be FIVE BLOODY MOVIES.
THE LONG VERSION:
In true IDOTAM fashion, I'm going to tell you up front that I enjoyed this movie a great deal, and then spend the rest of this article tearing it apart, so...you've been warned.
To paraphrase the great James May, Rowling and her contributors had all of the ingredients to make an amazing shepherd's pie, and they went and used dog meat. This movie had all of the elements it needed to be, start to finish, a truly amazing sequel:
- The setup from the first movie was excellent!
- The returning characters are all excellent!
- The use of fantastic beasts is excellent!
- The universe, that whole grown-up Potterverse thing is excellent!
They still managed to cock it up, and they did it in a way that's rather...un-Potterish, actually. The one, single thing that this movie really suffers from is a ham-fisted, overly complicated story. With the exception of a few items -- I'm looking at you, Horcruxes -- Rowling's previous stories have been relatively straight forward. While they aren't without their twists, the twists are usually in excellent service to the story. That's...completely not what's going on here. There are so many different things going on at once in this movie that you lose track of almost everything. The movie feels disjointed and haphazzard, and some of the storytelling is just plain lazy. Several key plot points in this movie almost directly contrast with events from the first film, and all viewers are offered to try and make sense of things are a few very sloppy lines of dialogue before the scene is hurried along. Finally, the extent to which this film leans on coincidences for major plot points is insulting, culminating in the biggest, most "Wait, what the FUCK?" moment in the film's last 30 seconds that you're likely to have experienced in recent memory.
Fortunately, for all of the badness that the story brings to the movie, there are several characters on hand that not only keep it from being bad, but somehow also manage to make the movie quite entertaining. Chief among them is the film's protagonist. Eddie Redmayne's Newt Scamander is, every single second that he's on screen, perfect. Newt may be the most fully realized character in any of the Harry Potter films, and that includes Harry himself. Add to that his inherent link to the movie's many magical creatures, and you can't help but love every moment he's on screen. Some of the best parts of the movie revolve around watching Newt care for his menagerie of critters. If the cinematic equivalent of 'feeding the pets' is this entertaining, you know something's being done properly.
Returning for a much larger role in this film is Johnny Depp's Grindelwald, and while this will probably get me stoned by Potterheads everywhere, I will stand by my feeling that he is a FAR better villain than Voldemort ever was. He's smarter, he's more charismatic, he's more sinister, he's just...MORE EVIL. Voldemort always felt like weak tea to me. Bellatrix LeStrange was a much scarier villain -- all credit to the amazing Helena Bonham-Carter -- and it was easier to hate Lucious Malfoy, yet...Voldemort was in charge? This isn't the case with Grindelwald. You know precisely why he's the Big Bad in this film. There's nothing particularly creative about his methods, but sometimes, the old ways are best, and Depp carries it all off perfectly without any of the customary vamping that he tends to resort to in some of his other films.
There are a host of other characters at play in the film as well, some returning and some new, but they're all almost completely unremarkable because of how the story handles them. The two exceptions to this blandness are Jacob and Queenie. Their presence is notable for entirely bad reasons.
I'll start with Dan Fogler's Everyman, Jacob Kowalski. Fogler tries SO DAMN HARD to bring back some of the excellence that he showed in the first movie, but the story just won't let him. He spends half of this film being a sage to Newt and the other half of the film being a moron of such a high caliber that it feels out of character for him.
And then there's poor Queenie. Allison Sudol's mind-reading gal from New York is given such a bad road to walk in this movie that I felt really, really awful for her. The extent to which her character is turned into an absolute waste of oxygen is heart-breaking. I'm seriously stunned that Rowling would have written her off in this fashion, especially given how pivotal she was to the first film's most emotional moments. I'll touch more on her in the spoilers section.
And actually, now that I'm thinking about it, Tina gets written like garbage in this movie too. I'm not sure what Rowling was smoking when she was writing the female characters in this movie, but the next time someone whinges about men writing women poorly, I'm going to point them at this movie and wait patiently. Tina and Queenie were both really excellent, seriously contributory characters to the first film, and ... well, less so in this one.
The Crimes Of Grindelwald has no right to have been as entertaining as it was -- and make no mistake, it was very entertaining. Redmayne and Depp carry almost the entire film on their shoulders, aided more than once by the critters in Newt's suitcase, but there's no denying that this world deserves better than Rowling is giving it.
HERE THERE BE SPOILERS! WANDS AT THE READY?
- Okay, fucking seriously with the Love charm? In what way is that not one small step away from the Imperio curse, one of the so-called Unforgivable Curses? I mean WHAT THE FUCK? Queenie, of all people?? And the casual nature with which Newt handles that situation instead of rightfully telling her that she's kind of a monster for doing that to ANYONE, let alone someone she supposedly cared about, and...and....AUGH! And while we're on this topic...
- Seriously, how do you take a wonderful character like Queenie and turn her into a shallow, manipulative, dangerously impulsive, easily swayed lunatic like that?? This is the 21st fucking century! Can we not write women -- hell, ANYONE! -- like this anymore please? There are so many other things that could have been done to move the story forward without leaning on a wagonload full of this kind of trope-ish bullshit.... I really hope that I missed something huge and I'm flying off the handle about this without reason. Someone, PLEASE tell me that's the case here.
- Ghostbusters, much? First with the giant Cat Dragon thing and then again with the blue flaming dragons?? And on that note...
- Dear people who wanted blue flame dragons, we regret to inform you that Game Of Thrones did that shit way better.
- Fuck all of the other people who got turned to ash during the blue flame extravaganza, when the Niffler crawled out of the ruins all singed and smokey, I was legitimately concerned that the movie was going to kill the poor dear. That, right there, was the only seriously emotional point in the whole film for me.
- BABY NIFFLERS.
- Can we talk about Newt's adorable, but painfully stereotyped ginger assistant for a moment? Okay, moment's over.
- How fucking stupid is it that Tina somehow thinks shy, sweet Newt would hook up with Lete LeStrange -and- get engaged so quickly? Given how the first movie ended, and given that this one starts off a few MONTHS later, not years, she never thought to write Newt a letter? Place a phone call? Send a bloody owl? Do ANYTHING other than make a stupid assumption that in NO WAY fits the man she spent the entire first movie getting to know?! SLOPPY FUCKING STORYTELLING!
Ugh. The more I think about how sloppy the story was and how poorly some of the characters were written, the more I want to be done writing this review.
So I'm done.
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