Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald (2018)

The second installment to the Fantastic Beasts series set in the Harry Potter universe, is even more muddled and unintelligible as the original Fantastic Beasts! The first story was already a mess with its paper thin plot and incoherent storyline. That ended with the image of Johnny Depp's face being revealed as the real face of villain Grindelwald to pave the way for part 2.

Part 2 opens up excitingly enough with the escape of Grindelwald from a maximum security prison. 3D was however not well exploited in most of the action in this movie as it was either not very apparent or in the case of the opening sequence, filmed too dark for any details to be savoured. The trick about filming action sequences in the dark is audiences are left to fill in the details with their own imagination! Talk about audience involvement!

The plot thickens, or rather more appropriately, gets more baffling, as many characters resurfaced and introduced without any lasting impression. Some, like the case, of a younger Professor Dumbledore played by Jude Law, who have some brief scenes which lend very little substance to the plot apart from providing a cheap thrill link to the Harry Potter stories. The rest of the characters failed to strike any impact and overall the feeling of magic and wonder was sadly missing in any of the scenes. Academy Award winner Eddie Redmayne does not have the screen presence or look to carry this movie through much less an entire series! His nerdy and naïve character Newt, is often annoying and tiring to endure. Johnny Depp could have perhaps provided some semblance of excitement had his character been given more substance and meaty scenes to play. As it stands, I think it is fair to conclude that this is probably THE worst and most boring installment in the Harry Potter franchise.

The title of a film is always important as it can set the tone and expectations of the audiences. Here, we have "Crimes of Grindelward" but Grindelward rarely appears, and his so called "crimes" were to escape from prison and set up a grand plan to enlist followers to his agenda of raising pure blood wizards and ultimately ruling over the wizard world as well as non wizard world (something I could judge as being a crime in progress at best). No, to me, the only "crimes" committed here are by the film makers for having wasted an estimated USD200 million to produce this piece of trash, the millions of hours wasted by audiences around the world (me included for my two hours loss) watching this, and the hundreds of millions of hard earned money (global box office exceeded USD600 million!) spent from audiences all over the world to buy tickets to watch this in the cinema. The pure waste of money, resources and time in making this movie is indeed criminal in the highest degree!