Review: Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore
Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore, directed by David Yates, tells the tale of Albus Dumbledore (Jude Law), the all powerful headmaster of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry who is quite peeved when the EVIL dark wizard Gellert Grindelwald (Johnny Depp Mads Mikkelsen) starts making moves to instill a new wizarding world order and eradicate the Muggles. Unable to stop him on his own due to a powerful spell cast between the two, Dumbledore recruits the help of magizoologist Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne) to put together a ragtag team to stop Grindelwald from acting demickey…Oh and also there’s like, a couple new fantastic beasts Newt needs to see.
The Harry Potter franchise (or Wizarding World franchise) is not only one of the biggest film franchises of all time, it’s also one of the most recognizable. These films were a pop culture icon before superheroes started dominating the market. And yet despite all that, I hardly remember anything about these films outside of the first four films in this franchise. Incidentally, those first four Harry Potter films were the only ones not directed by David freaking Yates, whose Wizarding World films now comprise of over half his own filmography.
This latest installment continues the mediocrity of the Wizarding World franchise, and much like the last two Fantastic Beast films Secrets of Dumbledore is one of the worst films in this franchise just for how uninteresting and dull the whole movie was.
Visually it’s about as flat and basic as now most of the films in this series. Nothing about this movie stands out; everything’s dull, all the colors are muted as hell, even the freaking spells that these wizards and witches are casting look freaking basic, and it’s all thanks to David Yate’s insistence on making everything look “real.” If this franchise want people to start giving it money, maybe start by getting a director who actually has a vision for their film like, I don’t know, Alfonso Cuarón or Chris Columbus, maybe someone like Mike Newell if you still want a British filmmaker behind your British movies. I feel like those guys could make some pretty good Wizarding World movies if you give them the chance Warner Bros, just someone other than freaking David Yates.
The plot and screenplay is not quite as bloated as the previous films (I would suspect it’s in part thanks to screenwriter Steve Kloves keeping J.K. Rowling’s excessive plot development from the last two films in check), but the film still trudges through a convoluted plot at a snail’s pace. A lot of the new characters are uninteresting and a lot of the old characters have nothing really to do here. Ezra Miller’s character, who was at one point a central plot point in these films, is all of a sudden downgraded to an inconsequential side character with no real importance to the film’s story, which makes the story from the last two films completely redundant now. He’s hardly in the film and kind of just disappears in the end, implying he’s no longer relevant to the story (which in hindsight is probably for the best.)
I guess I’ll address the elephant in the room and talk about Johnny Depp’s sacking from the franchise and being replaced by the less controversial Mads Mikkelsen. Mikkelsen in this movie was fine; in some aspects he makes for a much more charismatic leader of the wizard Nazi party than Depp did. What makes his character jarring however is the fact that Mikkelson gives a starkly different performance than Depp’s take on the character. Regardless though he wasn’t much of a standout in this film though by any means.
Overall this is about as boring of a film as you can get. Everything about this film was painfully mediocre. The performances were there, the score was there, everything looks muted and flat, the plot’s still incredibly convoluted and muddled, this was a boring waste of time. Judging by how poorly it’s doing as of this review at the box office, this seems to be the last Wizarding World film we’ll be seeing for quite some time considering how even Harry Potter fans are getting burnt out by these films. Hopefully the next time they reboot this franchise they’ll get someone who isn’t David Yates and give these films some much needed color and fun to them, otherwise if for some reason Warner Bros double down on finishing the last TWO films for this storyline (Fantastic Beasts was planned to be a FIVE PART STORYARC) I’m not sure if I’ll have any willpower to sit through another dull David Yates Harry Potter film. Warner Bros, just abandon this problematic franchise already and move on.
Final Verdict: 4/10