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Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald review: the gravest case of prequel-itis since The Phantom Menace

Eddie Redmayne in Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald  - Digital / 35mm
Eddie Redmayne in Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald - Digital / 35mm

Dir: David Yates; Starring: Eddie Redmayne, Johnny Depp, Jude Law, Ezra Miller, Zoë Kravitz, Katherine Waterston, Alison Sudol, Dan Fogler. 12A cert, 134 mins.

The biggest riddle in Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald is working out what on earth the film is actually about.

Describing what happens in this second of five planned instalments in JK Rowling’s Harry Potter spin-off franchise is a little easier: eccentric monster buff Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne) and the proto-fascist wizard leader Gellert Grindelwald (Johnny Depp) descending on Roaring Twenties Paris, along with other interested parties, in search of Credence Barebone (Ezra Miller), a teenage orphan afflicted by a dark, parasitical force, who was introduced in the previous film and may or may not be linked to the coming rise of Lord Voldemort.

But, for all of its intricate manoeuvring, none of it feels connected to real human experience, beyond the film’s own sonorous insistence that it absolutely must be, because look how many things are on fire, and listen to how loud the music is. Maybe we just need the right incantation. Explaino Plotronum? It’s worth a shot.

That makes David Yates’s film a very different proposition from his first Fantastic Beasts episode, which threw a fresh light on Rowling’s Wizarding World two Christmases ago, with its bustling period setting of Jazz Age Manhattan, its crop of appealing new characters, and its pointed gestures towards broader historical themes. (It felt like no accident that three of its main characters, magical sisters Tina and Queenie Goldstein and Muggle Jacob Kowalski, were coded as Jewish.)

But everything about The Crimes of Grindelwald is inward-looking and self-referential: it smacks of an epic join-the-dots game played across reams of unpublished appendices and footnotes. The result is one of the gravest cases of prequel-itis since Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, in which in place of ordinary storytelling, a chessboard’s-worth of characters and objects are fussily rearranged over the course of two hours plus change, in order to set the stage for whatever comes next.

At least the window-dressing is as dreamy as before, with Colleen Atwood-designed costumes to die for, sets you want to live in, and dazzlingly imaginative visual effects (there is a chilling sequence in which a Grindelwald curse, summoning his supporters to a rally at the Père Lachaise Cemetery, cloaks the boulevards of Paris in black silk).

Redmayne’s Newt remains the de facto main character, and is dispatched to Paris by the young Dumbledore (an appealing, only lightly utilised Jude Law), in spite of a Ministry of Magic travel ban imposed after the chaos of Beasts number one. But Depp’s Grindelwald is close behind, after escaping from the Ministry’s New York headquarters with a scheme of Joker-like complexity in a frantic and effects-heavy prologue.

Johnny Depp as Grindelwald
Johnny Depp as Grindelwald

Depp cuts an authentically sinister figure here, despite resembling John Lydon in the Country Life butter campaign, and reins in his showmanlike impulses for the most part. The much-ballyhooed love affair between Dumbledore and Grindelwald is handled as flimsily as you’d imagine it might be in a $200 million studio blockbuster: Dumbledore mutters in one scene that the two were “closer than brothers”, and we see younger versions of the characters briefly smouldering at one another in a couple of quietly preposterous flashbacks.

Far more interest is shown in Dumbledore’s career as a teacher of Defence Against the Dark Arts back at Hogwarts, where the film spends some time in its second act, accompanied by John Williams’s signature tinkle from the first-run Potter films.

The other members of Fantastic Beasts’ original core quartet return in a reduced capacity: a shame, since the chemistry between the foursome was a central part of the last film’s appeal. Tina Goldstein (Katherine Waterston), is now an Auror at the Ministry of Magic – a kind of government agent – while breathy bombshell Queenie (Alison Sudol) and Jacob (Dan Fogler) also become tangentially embroiled in the hunt for Credence, though Fogler’s role is more or less entirely reduced to popping his eyes and puffing his cheeks whenever something strange happens.

More central is Leta Lestrange (Zoë Kravitz), a Paris-born witch whose identity and connection to Credence rank high among the film’s dramatic reveals. But telling an audience this stuff is important is one thing: making them actually feel that it is is the magical part, and Grindelwald bungles the trick.