Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald

Now I want a big cat.

When the dangerous revolutionary Grindelwald (now Johnny Depp) escapes from prison, it falls to the timid Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne) to recapture him, much like he does with his other magical pokemon. This second installment of Fantastic Beasts fixes many of the issues I had with the last one.

First, there are less hijinks with the creatures which is a plus as there were some really silly moments in the last movie. This leads to more appreciation to the bits that do focus on the creatures and more importantly gives people (namely Newt) more character development time (finally)!

That's a strange looking cat! I want one!

The villain is more compelling this time around and having segments at Hogwarts is a great addition to the plot. As usual, the music and effects are great which overall makes for a superior movie to its predecessor. I give it 3.5 Dumbledores out of of 5 and would watch it again.

Fantastic Beasts and where to find them

Muggles are better than wizards.

A movie set in the Harry Potter universe, Fantastic Beasts does a decent job of standing on it's own with very few active call backs to Hogwarts etc. Eddie Redmayne plays a likeable enough lead who loves his fantastic animals, and this gets him into all sorts of humorous problems.

I did find some of his lines a little hard to understand though and the female lead was quite plain (though that's probably the instruction given to her). Also watching Eddie do a pig dance midway through has kinda cringe worthy.

Party assembled!

Fortunately Dan Fogler's non-mag (aka muggle) makes everything much better and turned out to be my favorite character in the whole thing! Effects wise, it's very good seeing all the cute, scary, icky creatures (to make toys of no doubt) though for some reason I felt the stage design, especially outdoor scenes, could have used some work.

While most of the problems in the movie are actually caused by the protagonists, there is a bad guy who rates a "meh" on the "ho hum" meter. Maybe he was put in after the fact to give the movie a darker shade? Who knows. The ending bit was also a little too drawn out. Just saying.

Still I quite enjoyed this film, and give it 3 magic suitcases out of 5.