FANTASTIC BEASTS: THE CRIMES OF GRINDELWALD Review; "A Fantastic Reason To See Something Else This Weekend"

FANTASTIC BEASTS: THE CRIMES OF GRINDELWALD Review; "A Fantastic Reason To See Something Else This Weekend"

As J.K. Rowling continues to expand the Wizarding World, Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald arrives in theaters this weekend but it sadly fails to live up to the high bar set by its predecessor.

Review Opinion
By JoshWilding - Nov 17, 2018 12:11 PM EST
Filed Under: Harry Potter
When Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them was released back in 2016, pretty much everyone assumed that it was a shameless cash grab by Warner Bros. to stretch out the Harry Potter franchise. However, what followed was an enjoyable romp with a lot of heart but this sequel is a total disappointment and the perfect example of everything that's wrong with follow-ups that do nothing more than set the stage for whatever comes next without focusing on the here and now anywhere near as much as they should.

Director David Yates was very hit and miss with his Potter movies and Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald is guilty of pretty much every misstep he made in those. There's a lot of shoddy direction here, not to mention choppy editing and a story which it's hard to believe was written by J.K. Rowling. 

Muddled and meandering, the two hour plus runtime drags and there's simply not much to enjoy here. Harry Potter fans are unlikely to appreciate the heavy-handed references to the author's previous work (why is Nicolas Flamel here again?) and the story is so weak, all it serves to accomplish is making you mildly interested in what comes next...or completely kill your interest in the franchise. The "Fantastic Beasts" are few and far between and honestly not that fantastic this time around. Rowling and Yates appear to have forgotten what made the first movie so much fun and these creatures feel shoehorned in to simply justify the title. 

While the principal cast does a decent enough job, it feels like they're all too aware that they're working with a subpar script. The supporting cast is downright awful, though, as the sequel is crammed full of dodgy accents and amateur dramatic level performances which it's hard to believe ever made it past the audition stage. Johnny Depp seems intent on scoring a Razzy too because this is yet another example of the actor playing a "weird" character and Grindelwald is neither particularly compelling or menacing; they should have kept Colin Farrell! 

There is thankfully one saving grace and that's Jude Law's Albus Dumbledore. He doesn't get anywhere near enough 
screentime and the scenes at Hogwarts will make you wish for a movie set there instead of Paris. His performance is fantastic, though, and it definitely appears as if the stage is being set for him to have a much larger role moving forward. The action is also solid enough but the magic seems less, well, magical this time around and there are some twists here which come across more dumb than anything else. Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald is a bad movie regardless of whether you're a hardcore Harry Potter fan or a newcomer to this world who hopped on board when Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them was released.

A fantastic reason to see something else this weekend, The Crimes of Grindelwald is a massive disappointment and the prospect of having to sit through three movie movies before this story is completed is downright depressing. Avoid. 


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aflynn
aflynn - 11/17/2018, 12:52 PM
Save your money for Into the Spider-verse, this ain't it chiefs.
JoeMomma29
JoeMomma29 - 11/17/2018, 1:05 PM
@aflynn - Really? Have you seen Spider-verse?
BeyondtheFuture
BeyondtheFuture - 11/17/2018, 12:53 PM
I profusely disagree it was absolutely fantastic, Depp is brilliant, Jude Law is perfect, you won't see the twists coming. It's a little long but if you love Harry Potter it's incredibly good, it's just not as fun as the first.
SimplyAz
SimplyAz - 11/17/2018, 12:54 PM
The Harry Potter movies never quite caught the magic of the books for me, so I've never been that much into them. I read the books as an adult after getting them for my siblings who are ten years younger than me, but I was blown away by how good they were.

I am surprised by how rough the reviews for Crimes of Grindewald is getting especially since Fantastic Beasts was so well received. My younger brother saw Crimes yesterday and didn't like it.

Comicbookart
Comicbookart - 11/17/2018, 1:20 PM
@SimplyAz - The books are 100x better than the movies and the movies can get a little unfaithful to the books at times.

There also isn't a single battle in the movies that capture the incredible battles in the books. Only the Dumbledore and Voldemort battle comes close but that's only because the battle in the book is 100x better.

And the battle in the movie is unfaithful from the book. lol.
SimplyAz
SimplyAz - 11/17/2018, 1:31 PM
@Comicbookart -

I agree with you completely.
The books were just so tense, and engrossing and full of details that the movies missed in my opinion. I understand the movies have a massive audience and are well loved, just for me they missed some of what made the books so good in my opinion.
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