MOVIE REVIEW – “Your honesty is a gift,” says Albus Dumbledore (Jude Law) to wizard-zoologist Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne), “even if it is sometimes painful.”  So let’s be honest and say that director David Yates’s Fantastic Beasts: the secrets of Dumbledore, the third film in the Harry Potter prequel series, is a terribly dull movie.

The Secrets of Dumbledore is the third film in the Fantastic Beasts series; two more are planned, but to end the Harry Potter spinoff here would be a coup de grace. There is nothing fantastic about the new film. The story is boring, and the characters are even more so. The whole movie is visually unimaginative. Although the title talks about “tics”, there is actually little real mystery to be found (one of the big reveals from the previous instalment is now fully revealed, but that’s it). Whereas its predecessor, The Crimes of Grindelwald, was built around a convoluted anticlimax – characters chasing each other around for two hours before finally coming round to a highly idiotic, shouting-at-each-other conclusion – this film falls apart much more quickly, to the point where it has to introduce a whole new magical concept to justify how random the events in it are.

Newt Scamander: the obligatory hero does the mandatory discreetly

Warner Bros. seems to have realised that the perpetually, annoyingly shy and not very charismatic Newt Salamander didn’t really “charm” the audience. At least, that could be the reason why the protagonist of the previous two episodes, played by Eddie Redmayne, is now properly relegated to the background in this one (even the posters have minimised the “Fantastic Beasts” part of the title in favour of the subtitle “Secrets of Dumbledore”). However, since it’s still a linear franchise (unlike the MCU, for example), the creators can’t afford to ditch the main characters here.

The story is set a year after the events of the first film and the still rather ridiculously coiffed and embarrassingly lame magical researcher Göthe Salamander (Eddie Redmayne), his tree-faced brother Theseus (Callum Turner) and his muggle friend, the somewhat Super Mario-like baker Jacob Kowalski (Dan Fogler), return, although why is hard to explain, and the story of the film doesn’t really push it. The more critical plot of the film, which is about the rise of the wizard Gellért Grindelwald (Mads Mikkelsen), who in some ways resembles Hitler (or another fascist dictator), and the troubles of young Albus Dumbledore (Jude Law), goes far beyond them. So these two Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are really little more than two loitering knights in this story. But more painful is the fact that Tina Goldstein (Katherine Waterston), a series regular, also doesn’t get much of a role in this film, apart from a few brief cameos and a few scenes of little consequence, despite being the other main character in the previous two, alongside Salamander.

But the joke is that, given the film’s structure, you could easily take Dumbledore out of the story, and not much would change. It’s a bad omen when no character is truly integral to a fantasy film. To give just one counter-example: whereas in the Lord of the Rings films, even the minor supporting characters played a cardinal role in the main events of the film, here, even the main characters are just mere pawns in the story, in which they are only included for no particular reason.

Love story

I understand that the “huge” twist (which we already knew) of Dumbledore explicitly admitting that he was once in love with Grindelwald is an essential message because of political correctness, “acceptance”, woke culture and so on, but if Dumbledore doesn’t repeat it six hundred times, we’ll still get it.

The McGuffin of the story (if a legendary animal can be considered as such) is a magical newborn deer known as “Qui-lin”, which is at the centre of a somewhat chaotic and incoherent night chase. Newt, for some reason beyond his love for the animal, protects it while the embittered Credence Barebone (Ezra Miller), now Grindelwald’s henchman, pursues him. Why is that? Nothing is clear at this point in the film, which perhaps wouldn’t be a problem in a well-constructed story, but this event is the cornerstone of a script defined on all sides and in almost every scene by the characters vague motivations. Although I’ve seen quite a few Harry Potter films and, of course, both of the previous ones, I found myself irredeemably lost in the story after a while, but I let it all go after a while. However, the motivations of some of the heroes and supporting characters are eventually clarified, but only much later through verbal explanations.

An even bigger problem is that the primary and major supporting characters seem to be constantly at the centre of 180-degree twists and turns, with such minimal story development and character development that it’s as if an algorithm was assigned to write the script instead of Steve Kloves (who wrote all but one of the Harry Potter films and has now returned to the franchise) and J.K. Rowling.

Sixty Shades of Grey

As for the film’s visual world, almost all the locations are plain and grey. Although the subdued visual palette works at times – for example, when the heartbroken Jacob is reintroduced – much of the film looks and feels too grey when it should be exciting. I’m not saying I expect Walt Disney-esque visuals from the film. Still, if it’s going to be about “Fantastic Beasts”, the colour palette could have been a little more varied – and while we’re at it, more “fantastic beasts” wouldn’t have hurt, apart from the ones we’ve seen so far and the baby deer-like qui-lins.

Many critics who saw the film at press screenings praised Mads Mikkelsen’s performance, but despite loving him in Casino Royale or Death Stranding, for example, he was like a bored Count Dracula here. Ezra Miller was the same – perhaps it was his various nervous breakdowns and scandals over his aggressive behaviour that made his character play as if he was constantly stoned, or was that simply the director’s directive, who knows? And as for the actors, it’s as if they’re all sleepwalking through the whole film. Jude Law was a notch more convincing – in fact, his portrayal of Dumbledore was the most compelling in the entire movie, which was an admirable achievement, especially as most of the dialogue he uttered was pretty clichéd or repetitive.

It’s the magic that’s missing

Apart from the fact that in The Secrets of Dumbledore, we finally learn – officially – the open secret – already “fantastically exciting” – that Dumbledore is gay, nothing else really worth mentioning happens in the film. For most of the film, the plot is scattered over many unimportant subplots. The colour grey dominates the whole movie (both figuratively and visually). Although it’s not explicitly stated, the entire film feels as if instead of magic, legendary beasts, a fabulous fantasy world and all the aspects that made the Harry Potter universe magical, the creators have chosen something else entirely, a different, more adult and also more boring direction (perhaps with an implicit ideological message) – while I would expect the latest film in a young adult fantasy universe centred on magic and wizards to enchant.

-BadSector-