Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald
Rating
C+ (77/100)
Three words
Better, Slow, Twists
Brief Review
A Harry Potter spin-off and sequel to Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. Newt Scamander continues his journey with Dumbledore to counteract the rise of the very powerful dark wizard, Grindelwald.
This is a mixed bag for me. I think it is a better movie than the first one and it addressed a lot of my original complaints, but it lets down in other ways. The biggest thing is this movie is basically doubling down on Harry Potter, to the exclusion of outside fans. I thought the first felt too distant from the Harry Potter franchise, this one feels like a Harry Potter movie. However, I don’t think this movie would make sense if you’re not a Harry Potter fan. On the flip side, this movie suffers from the same thing that Star Wars has in that the movie doesn’t seem to be totally consistent with the originals. It feels like they’re forcing new story lines even if it doesn’t totally work with the universe. Some fans will like the new stories and twists and some will hate them. As a standalone movie, there is a lot of exposition and it makes the movie feel very slow. It feels like a middle movie in a series, there’s a lot of setting up characters and story lines, but ultimately not a ton happens. It also sets up so many things that the movie kind of jumps around, but concludes very few of them. If you’re not a Harry Potter fan, I would probably skip this one as it is too in the weeds to enjoy. If you are a Harry Potter fan, you will be pleased that this movie feels more like a true Harry Potter movie, but the twists might upset you.
