Review of Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald (2018) by Linttaflamingo — 27 Nov 2018

This movie was F*CKING TERRIBLE and can burn in hell.

I have no idea what David Yates has been smoking but he just made the worst goddamn Harry Potter film ever and they are thinking about making three more?? Or I can't say I'm surprised since basically all this movie does is set up things for a sequel. And Jesus Christ is it so awful to watch through.

This movie starts with an alright scene of Grindelwald, played by Johnny Depp. He's flying a carriage in the middle of a storm. It was pretty cool. Then the film escalates into endless scenes of just jumping around to different places, people delivering atrocious dialogue that was written by J.K Rowling herself, and basically no development to Grindelwald himself whatsoever even though this film is supposed to be about him. Or so you would think. He's barely in this film anyway. He has a couple scenes but he just disappears all the time until the random confusing "climax" of the film. When it comes to the other characters, this film basically just forces in new faces that no one knows nor cares about. Just tons of characters everywhere that keep setting up something for the sequels. It was so goddamn confusing. Later the film tries to have these "shocking" reveals of these new faces and it was absolutely cringeworthy since I still couldn't even remember their names nor did I care. I just wanted to see Grindelwald or Newt Scamander again. There's barely even a main character since Newt also just disappears every now and then for a while and you're left wondering what these other characters are supposed to even do or mean for the story.

Well what about the story itself? Well I really don't have a damn clue. This loud mess just keeps jumping to these different plots without any sort of direction like the director had a seizure in the editing room. Something something happens, we see Newt for a little while and everyone thinks the movie is back on track again, and then it jumps to something something again. IT'S SUCH A MESS. No one is given any time to focus on so we could attach ourselves to at least someone. The pacing is horrible. This f*cking jumping around and shoving all this stuff to your face is so rushed and messy that it just goes past the point of caring about anything and the movie ends up being painfully boring.

I love the Harry Potter films, and sometimes even this randomness has some of those magical moments though. The visual effects are spectacular, especially in Newt's briefcase world, the setting is very nice and atmospheric, the score is great and I enjoyed Eddie Redmayne's, Jude Law's and Johnny Depp's performances. Even if Johnny Depp wasn't as intense as I'd hoped and even when Jude Law wasn't in the film for longer than probably 10 minutes. Jude Law especially was wasted potential. Also, Hogwarts is in this movie for about 15 minutes and I LOVED IT!!!

But seriously, that's where it ends. This absolute mess of a film has a confusing and boring plot, endless sequel bait, awful new characters, atrocious pacing and dialogue and just straight up no interest in paying attention to what we would like to see. They also put Nicolas Flamel in the film who I recognized from the Harry Potter films, but instead of making him a meaningful character with some backstory and actual personality traits, he's just used as a comic relief. He does this weird stupid slow run that's supposed to make the audience go HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH ABSOLUTELY HILARIOUS!!!! But it was just random.

After the film I basically had no idea what had happened and what's supposed to happen in the upcoming third film. I heard almost everyone asking each other if they understood anything either. If your audience can't understand almost a single thing that happens in your movie, you should maybe change a couple things.

At the time of writing this the film has already made almost 440 million dollars in the box office, so I guess they're just getting away with this anyway.