There’s nearly nothing noteworthy in Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore. It’s not without good qualities, but you’ll reflect on them less as properly enjoyable elements, and more like a decent gift bag at your lovestruck friend’s sixth wedding. Just because the night wasn’t a complete bust doesn’t mean you want to relive it — let alone attend the next one.
The gift bags in question are Mads Mikkelsen’s performance as Grindelwald (taking over for Johnny Depp) and Jude Law’s portrayal of Dumbledore. They’re talented men who give it their all, but even the spark of their passion is no match for the supermassive black hole of nothing this franchise has become. They’re not the only talented actors in the movie, but most of them are on their third round, and they’re stretched so thin, given such hollow material, that they’re just going through the motions, already lost to the gaping darkness that just recently snuffed out Mikkelsen and Law.
Conceptually, there’s little that distinguishes Secrets of Dumbledore from its predecessor, The Crimes of Grindelwald. Sure, there are details that are changed, and, indeed, character arcs go on different paths. Queenie (Alison Sudol) is now working with the baddies but still loves Jacob (Dan Fogler) and Grindelwald has been cleared of his crimes and is now pursuing election. But it’s debatable how much these distinctions actually matter, as it all registers as the same old thing as before. Grindelwald is up to no good, Dumbledore needs his rag-tag group of outcasts to stop him, there are some cute beasts, Credence (Ezra Miller) needs to learn about his family (again) and it’s difficult to care about any of it.
The Harry Potter series was always formulaic, but that was to its benefit. The first four stories (at least) had a presumed villain who was actually innocent, a presumed ally who was actually evil, and some new plot device at the center of the story. Yet while we can reduce the general stories of these films to this formula, they were stories about fundamentally different things, with concepts that grabbed the audience. The Chamber of Secrets scared us by showing something slithering in Hogwarts’s walls. Prisoner of Azkaban unveiled a darker side of the wizarding world and a godfather Harry never knew. Goblet of Fire gave Harry another unexpected, unwanted and inescapable level of fame through the wide world of sports and competition.
Basically, the Harry Potter series always asked, “what new adventure will Harry get into?” while using this new adventure to develop the greater story. After the first Fantastic Beasts, this new series just sticks with “What (insert fantasy creature here) will Grindelwald need to do bad stuff?” as a template. In The Secrets of Dumbledore, Grindelwald needs some magical deer babies that can see the future to help him change it in his favor. That it’s a beast that can see the future feels less essential and more like a retroactive check off a list. “Oh, right, Newt (Eddie Redmayne) is supposed to be the protagonist, and he’s a zoologist, uhhhh, make the plot device a magic animal.”
To its credit, not only is the beast in question is cute (consider that part of the gift bag), but Mikkelsen’s performance when handling it is something to behold. He interacts with the cute little guys with a reverence that’s fascinated, caring, and cruel, giving a performance that’s part midwife delivering a baby, part interpretive dance. As earnestly odd and compelling as this moment is, it’s also the only interesting moment in the movie in total—including any supernatural elements. As grating as much of Crimes of Grindelwald may have been, it had a few remarkable set pieces—particularly the opening escape on a magic carriage. In The Secrets of Dumbledore, the action amounts to actors either:
- Flicking their wrists with sticks in their hands as flickering CG magic fills the screen with swift sound effects
or
- Running in front of green screens.
In one scene, Newt and his brother Theseus (Callum Turner) escape from a cave with a sizable fire-breathing scorpion thing. In another, there’s some political dinner going on that goes awry, and Jacob and newcomer Professor Eulalie Hicks (Jessica Williams) are running in slow motion towards each other as debris flies all around them. In both of scenes, you half expect the characters to look at the audience and say, “better hang on, guys!”, the way Daniel Radcliffe did on that Quidditch ride at the Wizarding World of Harry Potter. That was a nice memory when I attended the park in 2016, and that kind of fun has its place, but in the context of an actual movie, it’s as dull as dishwater.
Untold numbers of brilliant technicians, animators, and stunt workers work on these films. All of them are artists and they’re all given squat to work with. It’s depressing to see. Director David Yates brought so much to this wizarding world in the past, distinguishing each of his Potter films in unique ways tonally (his collaboration with cinematographer Bruno Delbonnell on Half-Blood Prince gets better with age), but in The Secrets of Dumbledore, just like Eddie Redmayne’s awkward/nerdy mannerisms, he’s going through the motions.
Originally, you could ask, “what will Yates bring to the franchise?” with the same enthusiasm as, “what new adventure will Harry get into?” Now, all we can ask of both Yates and the Wizarding World is: “what are you still doing here?”
