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Eddie Redmaynes wades his way through the murky Crimes of Grindelwald |
Director: David Yates
Cast: Eddie Redmayne (Newt Scamander), Katherine Waterston
(Tina Goldstein), Dan Fogler (Jacob Kowalski), Alison Sudol (Queenie
Goldstein), Jude Law (Albus Dumbledore), Johnny Depp (Gellert Grindelwald),
Ezra Miller (Credence Barebone), Zoë Kravitz (Leta Lestrange), Callum
Turner (Theseus Scamander), Carmen Ejogo (Seraphina Picquery), Claudia Kim
(Nagini), William Nadylum (Yusuf Kama), Kevin Guthrie (Abernathy), Brontis
Jodorowsky (Nicolas Flamel), Derek Riddell (Torquil Travers)
What were the Crimes of Grindelwald? Well the main one is this
film. Grindelwald does what we thought might have been impossible – he features
prominently in the first flat-out bad Harry Potter film. Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald is a near
incomprehensible mess of clumsy set-up for future plots, tedious side-plots,
poorly executed drama and a vast array of not particularly interesting
characters struggling through not particularly interesting events with low
stakes. I feel asleep twice for a few moments in the film. There is very little
in it to recommend.
Dark wizard Grindelwald (Johnny Depp) opens the film by
escaping from captivity and flees to Paris. There he plans to – well to be
honest I’m not terribly sure what he is planning to do at all. I think it
involves something about world domination. Also it involves locating and
winning to his side mysterious young wizard Credence (Ezra Miller) from the
first film. Meanwhile Grindelwald’s old friend (or was it more? The film ain’t
saying) Albus Dumbledore (Jude Law) sends Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne) to
Paris to find Credence first. Lots of things sort of happen after that, but
most of them are building up to the next three (three!) films.
Three films? Seriously? Was that something they had in mind
from the start? It feels a lot more likely it’s an idea that came out of the
financial success of the first film, rather than any artistic decision. It’s
certainly very hard indeed to see many narrative, tonal or thematic links from
the first film carrying across to this one. This one feels like it comes from a
completely different type of story. More than anything, the film-makers seemed
to desperately want to forget the whole “fantastic beasts” angle we started
this damn thing with. The odd beast is thrown in every so often to keep ticking
the title box, but this flies off (or tries to) into such different, would-be
darker, stakes that the beasts never feel a natural link. This is a film that
wants – with its muted palette, murders, darkness and (in one supremely
misjudged moment) a Holocaust reference – to set us on a dark path to future
misery and war. Whatever happened to chasing beasts around to catch them in a
suitcase?
Instead the film doubles down on Potter-lore. You virtually need a PhD in the Potterverse
to keep on top of what’s going on. Spells, objects, phrases, charms and
incantations are thrown in all over the place, with very little explanation for
the audience. Now I can roll with this a certain amount, hell we’ve all read
the books and seen the films, but there are at least a few things in here that
could desperately do with some reminders for the audience (what is an obscurus
again?) so that we can understand their contextual importance. Instead the film
barrels along, throwing plot points all over the place and ramming information
into our ears.
In fact, most of the film is like an epic info-dump of
material designed to set up stuff for later films. Again, you can’t help but
feel that they suddenly realised after completing the first film that if they
were going to spin this out into another multi-volume series, there were lots
and lots and lots of plot threads they hadn’t even attempted to introduce at
the start. Instead of taking a bit of time to build these things in and make us
care about them, this film throws them into the mix as quickly as possible to
make up for lost time.
In all this mass pile of information thrown at us, the film
could really do with less going on. There is a massive, red-herring- filled
plot about a character’s family history that takes up loads of screen time and
eventually turns out to mean absolutely nothing at all. This is a misdirection
that could work well in a book – but in a film as crammed and packed as this
one, it makes you tear your hair out. How long did we spend on this and it
means naff all at the end!
In fact, you can’t help but feel that Rowling as tried to
write a book here rather than a film. These sprawling bits of wizarding lore,
universe building, red herrings and other plots would have worked really well
if she had 500 pages of prose to explore and build them in. But she’s not
experienced enough a screenwriter to make them work well here. If another
scriptwriter had adapted her ideas into something that works as a screenplay –
the sort of focused work that changed the sprawling Order of the Phoenix into a tightly focused couple of hours – the
film would be far better.
But instead, the film feels like everyone has got far too
used to producing these epics, to a certain style of making the films. There is
a lack of fresh ideas here, with a lack of independent or new eyes to see the
whole and suggest how an outsider could see it. This also extends to David
Yates’ direction which, while competent and well managed as ever, now feels
like he has run out of ideas of how to film this wizarding stuff in a new way,
which is fair enough after five films. It’s a film that desperately needs fresh
new blood in it, and a universe that needs the sort of creative kick-up-the-backside
that Alfonso Cuaron gave in The Chamber
of Secrets.
You feel sorry for some of the actors carried across from
the first film. Dan Fogler has so little to do that he would have been better
off not being in the film. His absence (for instance, if his memory wipe from
the previous film had stuck) would at least have been motivation for the
actions of Queenie in this film, who gets a rushed and nonsensical character
arc that seems to completely change the character we got to know in the first
film. Katherine Waterston is saddled with virtually nothing as Tina.
Instead, far more time is given over to Johnny Depp. Depp’s
casting was controversial to say the least – and not worth it. Depp gives one
of his truly lazy, eccentric performances – aiming possibly for brooding
intensity, he instead lands out dull and underwhelming, a charisma vacuum. It’s
hard to see him leading hundreds of followers in a revolution. Jude Law does
far better as a twinkly Dumbledore (even if his performance bears little
resemblance to Gambon or Harris), and his scenes are the highlights of the
film. The film, by the way, shies cowardly away from any real depiction at all
at the alleged love affair (which Rowling talks about) between Dumbledore and
Grindelwald, presumably because it would make the film a harder sell in China.
And what of our hero? Well Eddie Redmayne is still charming,
but his character feels out of step with the increasingly darker tone the film
aims for. He’s also saddled with a supremely dull and unengaging sort of
love-triangle with his brother (a forgettable Callum Turner) and ex-girlfriend
and brother’s fiancée Leta Lestrange (an out of her depth Zoë
Kravitz). The film talks a bit about the troubled relationship of the
Scaramander brothers – but is so rushed it never has time to really show us any
of this, so instead has to tell us
about it, even though everything we see basically shows their relationship as
being reserved but loving.
But then that’s just par for the course of this
underwhelming and deeply uninvolving film. The stakes should feel really high,
but they never do because to be honest you are never really sure what they are.
The film ends with the expected fire filled wizarding special effects stuff –
but honest to God I had no idea what was going on, why it was happening, what
was the danger or where it came from. It just felt like the film needed to end
with a bang. There are moments of this film that should have had some emotional
force but they don’t because it’s so crammed to the margins with plots,
superfluous characters (many of whom are introduced with fanfare and then
barely appear in the film) and pointless digressions that when things happen to
characters we care about from the first film, it doesn’t carry the force it
should. Five films of this? I’m not
sure on the basis of this I’d want to see another five minutes. A major, major,
major misfire.
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