Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald is a well-crafted and well-produced film that ultimately amounts to nothing.

Spoilers ahead.

You can clearly tell that a lot of effort was put into this movie. The visual effects are a treat to watch. The characters are well-defined and fleshed out. There are plenty of neat little tidbits, be it the casting choices, Easter Eggs, etc.

But as great as the visual effects are, as great as the banter between characters is (even if there isn’t as much when compared to the previous film), and as inventive as the Wizarding World is this time around, the movie fails due to the stagnant and convoluted storyline of the first two acts and the out of left field twists (and untwists) of the last third.

Characterization Detours

There is a constant lack of momentum and direction throughout the film, despite the simple premise given to Newt at the beginning: find Credence.

Many reviewers have already mentioned that this film has way too many characters. As a result, the plot is constantly forbidden from moving forward, with the film instead focusing on what I like to call “characterization detours.”

We go from Grindelwald to Newt and Theseus and Leta to Grindlewald to Newt and Dumbledore to Newt and Jacob and Queenie to Tina and Credence and Nagini to Newt and Jacob to Credence and Nagini to Queenie to Newt and Jacob and Tina to Dumbledore and Leta and Theseus to everyone.

Every time the film is forced to introduce, reintroduce and/or characterize one of its characters, the momentum of the film screeches to a halt.

The actual Harry Potter books were long enough to fit this many characters while giving each of them characterization and propelling the plot forward at the same time. The Harry Potter film adaptations were able to sidestep this problem because they only focused on characters that were important to the plot of whatever story they were telling, and then basically made everyone else an extra.

Here, however, when treated to an extended flashback of Leta’s past, or Tina meeting Yusuf, the plot is forced to bend over backwards in order to tie everything back into the narrative.

Poor Action Scenes

There are very few action scenes in the film, and they are all either unengaging or hard to understand.

The opening scene where Grindelwald escapes is an example of an engaging action scene.

Unfortunately, the camerawork and constant rain make the events that happen hard to follow, a problem that is compounded by the lighting of the scene, which keeps flashing in an extremely distracting way. I eventually had cover the movie screen with my hand because of how hard the scene was to watch.

The final fight scene is an example of an action scene that is easy to understand.

Grindelwald's blue flame kills every Auror in the rally that isn't a major character and then turns into a monster that is wreaking havoc in Paris, and the wizard heroes combine the powers of their wands to create a red wall that ultimately ends up destroying Grindelwald's blue monster, saving Paris. Unfortunately, the premise is dumb and the execution is boring. A bunch of wizards create a thing that destroys another thing.

The Final Act

Fittingly, since the movie was written by J.K. Rowling, it ends with several Rowling-esque plot twists. Unfortunately, twists that would be great if read in a book don't necessarily translate that well when put into a film.

In the Harry Potter books, when there was a huge plot twist at the end, there would also be extremely long monologues explaining the twist. In the Harry Potter movies, those same twists would often be much shorter in explanation in order to fit the running time of a movie.

In the former, you could actually read the text at your own pace and fully comprehend everything, while the latter was much more simple and easy to understand since it was a movie.

In this film, we are frontloaded with way too much information to process and understand (I am referring to the scene where Leta and Yusuf monologue about their backstories). Once you lose track of what's going on, you are essentially lost for the rest of the scene.

The final twist ending, on the other hand, which reveals that Credence is a Dumbledore, has little to no context or justification behind it.

What Was the Point?

The movie is extremely unrewarding to watch.

There is a constant lack of momentum due to the characterization detours, and a dearth of good action.

Dumbledore and Grindelwald, despite being heavily featured in the marketing, do very little in the entire film.

But worst of all, the movie feels like a setup to the movie we were actually promised.

So you’re left with the question: “What was the point?”

What was the point of Nicolas Flamel?

What was the point of Nagini?

What was the point of devoting so much time to Leta’s flashbacks and backstories if she was going to die by the end?

In the end, this movie was just a needlessly overstuffed in-between film.

I don’t want to make it seem that this film was horrible, because it is by no means horrible. And you can tell that the creators put in a lot of time effort into the movie, whether it be through the CGI, or the characters, or the plot twists that would work well in a book.

What results is a perfectly competent movie, albeit one with many flaws.

Overall Rating - 5 Magical Creatures out of 10