The Good
The beasts. By far the best moments in the movie were in the briefcase. The human characters were fine but we’ve seen eight movies about the magic humans in this universe, let’s focus on the titular characters next time.
The acting was solid. I really enjoyed Colin Farrell as the villain (maybe his best performance outside of In Bruges and Seven Psychopaths) and I don’t know why they waysided him as Grindelwald for Johnny Depp. They could just as easily have written around the fact that nobody had seen Grindelwald face to face in a Keyser Soze kind of way, because it wasn’t a surprise that he was the big bad everyone kept referencing but what do I know?
It was relatively funny. Too many jokes didn’t land, especially early Jacob’s confusion, because they’ve been done to death but they weren’t cringeworthy or anything. The banter and visual gags were quite fun.
I like to imagine the policemen trying to explain the amount of bullets recently fired from their firearms with no recollection of firing them to their superiors.
The acting was solid. I really enjoyed Colin Farrell as the villain (maybe his best performance outside of In Bruges and Seven Psychopaths) and I don’t know why they waysided him as Grindelwald for Johnny Depp. They could just as easily have written around the fact that nobody had seen Grindelwald face to face in a Keyser Soze kind of way, because it wasn’t a surprise that he was the big bad everyone kept referencing but what do I know?
It was relatively funny. Too many jokes didn’t land, especially early Jacob’s confusion, because they’ve been done to death but they weren’t cringeworthy or anything. The banter and visual gags were quite fun.
I like to imagine the policemen trying to explain the amount of bullets recently fired from their firearms with no recollection of firing them to their superiors.
The Bad
Pairing up all of the characters in the first movie was so rushed, I didn’t care about any of their relationships (well, maybe Newt and Jacob, but I don’t think that’s what they were going for) and I think it would have been better served if they'd picked one and developed the other later, if at all.
So it’s strongly implied that Newt carries the black soul of his childhood girlfriend in a briefcase because she didn’t use her magic when she was young and turned feral before the age of ten. Moral implications of that aside, Harry Potter did not use his magic until he was 11 and he did not turn into a tornado of evil. Is that an exception for lightning-bolt scar kids because you can only have one storm-related anomaly at once? Seems legit.
Was there any struggle whatsoever? Newt just kind of dilly-dallied around solving problems he himself created like Homer Simpson.
Was the President supposed to be a social commentary on Trump as someone who clearly shouldn’t be President because she was terrible at her job. I would have preferred… whoever actually was President back in ’26. I’m gonna guess Taft. That was a President’s name, right? I’m basing this assumption on Simpsons references. Burns’ mum dated him. I realise that this is a different dimension from both ours and Springfield but you can’t have characters complaining about magical inequality when this era is 80 years ahead of its own time when it comes to women’s rights. What, a woman became President before she could even vote? Presuming this is halfway through her second term.
The magic. Look, the CGI was fine but Dr Strange set a new bar for what you can do with magic and this was pretty tame, even by this franchise’s standards. One of the cool things about Harry Potter was whenever there was something boring happening on screen, there was always magic stuff happening in the background. This movie, not so much. Whenever there were little magic things happening, like the strudel scene, they were front and centre, but in the expositional scenes, there weren’t any owls dropping letters or household items doing chores by themselves or moving staircases happening behind the characters.
The ending suffered from Return of the King Syndrome without the excuse of having to tie up loose ends. It ended in the subway and then it ended with the neuralising and then it ended with neuralising the main muggle and then it ended with giving the muggle his bakery and then it ended with Newt leaving and then it ended with the muggle getting deneuralised and it was like most of these people are going to show up at least one more time, why are you wasting time wrapping up their stories just to unwrap them next year?
So it’s strongly implied that Newt carries the black soul of his childhood girlfriend in a briefcase because she didn’t use her magic when she was young and turned feral before the age of ten. Moral implications of that aside, Harry Potter did not use his magic until he was 11 and he did not turn into a tornado of evil. Is that an exception for lightning-bolt scar kids because you can only have one storm-related anomaly at once? Seems legit.
Was there any struggle whatsoever? Newt just kind of dilly-dallied around solving problems he himself created like Homer Simpson.
Was the President supposed to be a social commentary on Trump as someone who clearly shouldn’t be President because she was terrible at her job. I would have preferred… whoever actually was President back in ’26. I’m gonna guess Taft. That was a President’s name, right? I’m basing this assumption on Simpsons references. Burns’ mum dated him. I realise that this is a different dimension from both ours and Springfield but you can’t have characters complaining about magical inequality when this era is 80 years ahead of its own time when it comes to women’s rights. What, a woman became President before she could even vote? Presuming this is halfway through her second term.
The magic. Look, the CGI was fine but Dr Strange set a new bar for what you can do with magic and this was pretty tame, even by this franchise’s standards. One of the cool things about Harry Potter was whenever there was something boring happening on screen, there was always magic stuff happening in the background. This movie, not so much. Whenever there were little magic things happening, like the strudel scene, they were front and centre, but in the expositional scenes, there weren’t any owls dropping letters or household items doing chores by themselves or moving staircases happening behind the characters.
The ending suffered from Return of the King Syndrome without the excuse of having to tie up loose ends. It ended in the subway and then it ended with the neuralising and then it ended with neuralising the main muggle and then it ended with giving the muggle his bakery and then it ended with Newt leaving and then it ended with the muggle getting deneuralised and it was like most of these people are going to show up at least one more time, why are you wasting time wrapping up their stories just to unwrap them next year?
The Ugly
They kept playing the music from Saw and it was really distracting. I was fully expecting either Grindy or Newt to end the movie by saying ‘Game Over’ to the other.
The movie was fine but after seeing some truly spectacular magic in Dr Strange, this felt fairly forgettable. And unless they’re going to mix things up a little and put Newt in a new country or universe again to keep things fresh, I probably won’t bother with the sequels.