Hot take: Fantastic Beasts: the Crimes of Grindelwald

‘Fantastic Beasts: the Crimes of Grindelwald’, the second in the installment of the pre-Harry

Potter franchise, is a frustrating experience. The director seems more interested in giving us set piece upon set piece, action upon action without any interest in telling a story or building a narrative with some coherent structure. Characters are not so much driven by their motives as the audience is told what their motives are: this oddly expository approach betrays a laziness that someone who has been directing these movies for years may be forgiven for having, but here the stakes are too high. The dialogue is laughably childish for the most part, the cinematography is too full of really close-up or wide aerial shots and the editing is jumpy enough to give you a headache.

J K Rowling’s admirable attempt at drawing Trump and Brexit parallels is drowned in the fire and fury of the spectacle, and honestly unsubtle metaphors cannot work without an actual story that the audience is interested in or fully-rounded characters that one wants to root for. Magic is reduced to gimmickry here, the one thing you wouldn’t expect from this series. There’s a lot happening in the film—and a few stray moments that will recall the best of the Harry Potter world—but unfortunately this one fails to move, and in doing so seems to have completely lost the plot.

Genre: Adventure, Family, Fantasy

Language: English Runtime: 2h 14min Year of release: 2018 Streaming Platform: Netflix

Hot take is a series in which I offer my first impressions of films from India and around the world.