Fan­tas­tic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald

A whole gen­er­a­tion has grown up in a world belong­ing to JK Rowl­ing. Since the pub­li­ca­tion of ​‘Har­ry Pot­ter and the Philosopher’s Stone’ in 1997, the media land­scape and how we con­sume cul­ture has changed, but our unfail­ing­ly human desire for flights of fan­ta­sy has not. Per­haps now more than ever we are tempt­ed to retreat into worlds of our own cre­ation, so dis­en­chant­ed with the mess made of the very real one we live in.

The great gift of the Har­ry Pot­ter fran­chise was the way in which it cast a spell over the world, in turn lead­ing fans to forge their own com­mu­ni­ties built on their com­mon cause, and gain from Rowling’s words so much more than a charm­ing sto­ry about a boy wiz­ard. Friend­ships, rela­tion­ships, under­stand­ing – all born from sto­ries of The Boy Who Lived.

In 2018 the vice-grip of Pot­ter­ma­nia may have loos­ened slight­ly, but the chil­dren who loved Har­ry Pot­ter now have chil­dren who love Har­ry Pot­ter, the high street still over­flows with licensed mer­chan­dise, and every cou­ple of years, anoth­er film set in the mag­i­cal world of JK Rowl­ing swag­gers into cin­e­mas with ​‘sure-fire box office hit’ rub­ber-stamped on its forehead.

In this bells-and-whis­tles sequel to the 2016 instal­ment, ever-earnest Eddie Red­mayne repris­es his role as Newt Sca­man­der, a gawky ​‘mag­i­zo­ol­o­gist’ who spends most of the film doing any­thing but cavort­ing with the tit­u­lar fan­tas­tic beasts. Pick­ing up where the first film left off, wiz­ard­ing né’er-do-well Gellert Grindel­wald (John­ny Depp) has escaped incar­cer­a­tion and intends to car­ry out some vague nefar­i­ous scheme to rid the world of non-mag­i­cal peo­ple. That’s bad news for the Min­istry of Mag­ic, notably Newt’s broth­er The­seus (Cal­lum Turn­er) and his sis­ter-in-law-to-be Lita Lestrange (Zoe Kravitz) – not to men­tion Gellert’s for­mer lover (if you squint at the delib­er­ate­ly ambigu­ous flash­backs) Hog­warts Big Dog Albus Dum­b­le­dore (Jude Law).

But Sca­man­der isn’t inter­est­ed in tri­fling with Grindel­wald. He’s got a base­ment full of beast­ies, and is spend­ing most of his time pin­ing after Amer­i­can witch Tina Gold­stein (Kather­ine Water­ston) who – fol­low­ing a watery com­ic mis­un­der­stand­ing – incor­rect­ly believes Sca­man­der to be engaged. Mean­while, Tina’s Blanche DuBois-esque sis­ter Quee­nie (Alli­son Sudol) reunites with her non-mag­i­cal beau Jacob Kowal­s­ki (Dan Fogler) for a trip to vis­it Sca­man­der in Lon­don, and trou­bled young wiz­ard Cre­dence Bare­bone (Ezra Miller) finds a com­pan­ion in the search for his birth moth­er, a cir­cus per­former named Nagi­ni (Clau­dia Kim). With such a stacked human cast, per­haps it’s no sur­prise the crea­tures lose out on screen time, and that audi­ences lose out on cohesion.

There are plen­ty of east­er eggs for hard­ened Pot­ter­heads, includ­ing some famil­iar names and faces and almost com­i­cal lev­els of fore­shad­ow­ing. Is the wild plot backed up by any kind of log­ic? Not real­ly. At one point, a char­ac­ter gives a lengthy mono­logue which pro­vides so much expo­si­tion you’ll wish you had a pen to take notes. At anoth­er, a plot­hole is dis­missed with a laugh and ​“It didn’t work!” which, fair play, is quite a ball­sy feat of nar­ra­tive erasure.

Jude Law is the film’s guid­ing light as a mid­dle-aged Dum­b­le­dore, his sparkling charis­ma a wel­come ton­ic to the charis­ma vac­u­um that is John­ny Depp’s bloat­ed and tired Shake­speare-in-the-park act. There’s a tired­ness in his eyes that hints at a per­son­al trau­ma more inter­est­ing than any­thing occur­ring on-screen. Sim­i­lar­ly, Alli­son Sudol is a com­pelling pres­ence as flighty and naïve Quee­nie, strug­gling to rec­on­cile her love for a ​‘non-mag’ with her iden­ti­ty as a witch, and Cal­lum Turn­er a wel­come foil as Newt’s despair­ing elder broth­er. The much-hyped Nagi­ni, after so much has been said about her role, has approx­i­mate­ly three lines, and no back­sto­ry (let’s assume that’s being saved for one of the three planned sequels).

The film’s pol­i­tics don’t fare much bet­ter. Rowl­ing has always had a ten­den­cy to repack­age the suf­fer­ing of minori­ties for mass-con­sump­tion, and here we see the wiz­ard­ing world’s ongo­ing blood feud segue into an awk­ward World War Two/​Holocaust par­al­lel, ren­der­ing Grindel­wald a mag­i­cal ver­sion of Adolf Hitler by way of Enoch Powell’s ​‘Rivers of Blood’ speech. That might go over the heads of the young audi­ence the film is pri­mar­i­ly aimed at, but it feels excep­tion­al­ly gauche all the same, as much as the twists feel like wild Pot­ter revi­sion­ism in the name of mov­ing a tie-in fran­chise forward.

Every­thing ends – as one would expect from the sec­ond piece in a mul­ti-film puz­zle – on a grim­ly som­bre note. There’s slick, dizzy­ing­ly ambi­tious pro­duc­tion design fea­tur­ing plen­ty of glossy CGI and pret­ty cos­tume design (and a return to Hog­warts, resplen­dent with John Williams’ icon­ic ​‘Hedwig’s Theme’, which might raise a swell in the heart of those who grew up enthralled by the orig­i­nal Har­ry Pot­ter films), but all the gold feels cold, all the sparkling flour­ish­es catch like grit in your eye, when you realise this is a barefaced mon­ey-grab­bing monolith.

It’s most evi­dent in the film’s open­ing, where the gaunt vis­age of Depp, with his ice-blonde dye job and Mar­i­lyn Man­son con­tact lens­es, stares back on a 50-foot screen. The face that launched a thou­sand teenage crush­es has turned sin­is­ter since evi­dence of his abu­sive per­son­al­i­ty emerged from both his ex-wife Amber Heard and co-work­ers. Rowl­ing and direc­tor David Yates faced fierce crit­i­cism when Depp’s reprisal was announced, and Rowl­ing defend­ed her choice to not recast his part, cit­ing ​“our under­stand­ing of the circumstances”.

So this block­buster, built on the trust, sup­port and mon­ey of mil­lions of fans – many young women, many sur­vivors of trau­ma who have pre­vi­ous­ly tak­en com­fort in the fan­ta­sy world – opens on the face of a pow­er­ful man accused of beat­ing his wife. His cast­ing brings noth­ing to the film, and feels like a mid­dle-fin­ger kiss-off from the Pot­ter jug­ger­naut: your pain does not mat­ter to JK Rowl­ing. This one’s all about the prof­it mar­gin, and answers the age-old ques­tion, ​‘What’s the only thing bet­ter than mon­ey?’, with a wretched, emphat­ic, ​‘More’.