Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore (2022)

Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore (2022)

 

3/10

 

Starring

Eddie Redmayne

Jude Law

Ezra Miller

Dan Fogler

Alison Sudol

 

Directed by David Yates

 

I give this movie some praise in that the ability to craft over two hours of empty, boring nothingness is something I haven't seen in a while. In fact, I try my best to avoid being sucked into such an empty endeavor that yields no fruit.

This movie is very crafty; the script is written in such a way that it dodges and moves left to right, then back again, trying to create a web of suspense. But instead, what we got was a web of boredom, thanks to the all-knowing Dumbledore. The movie has this challenge: how to outsmart a man who has the ability to see you coming from all angles. Instead of embracing the challenge and trying to outsmart the man with some intelligent, smart-to-watch writing, the movie made the protagonist and his friends act in the most boring, long, and overly ambitious bogus plan that, in the end, made no sense. How they succeeded is a mystery; the biggest mystery is how easy it was to fool the magical world with some puppetry.

Continuing from the first two films, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (2016) and Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald (2018), Grindelwald is free and continues his plan to rid the world of Muggles (non-magical humans). Dumbledore has to stop his former lover from succeeding, so he creates his own army of lieutenants to stop Grindelwald’s plan from coming to fruition. He recruits Newt, who lost one of his animals to Grindelwald, and with Newt came the others who are now tasked with saving the human race.

The movie felt like it was written back to front. I guess they had already collated the names for the needed diversity, which meant the characters on the good side had increased way too much. Some had such minute roles that I wondered if none of the other characters could have handled that task along with theirs. With the huge crowd of actors and the end already in sight, the movie makes you feel like the screenplay was just made to fill up the necessary gaps and create characters and animals to help narrate the ending they wanted.

The swapping of Johnny Depp for Mads Mikkelsen made a lot of sense, and I did not miss Depp at all.

If there is anything better to do in this life, it pays to go do it. This movie has the power to bore you and annoy you when the crisscross of deception leads to another boring day at the movies.