Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore hits theaters on April 15, 2022.
The Secrets of Dumbledore is the third film in the Fantastic Beasts series; there are two more entries planned, but ending the Harry Potter spinoff here would be a mercy. There’s nothing fantastic about the new movie. The story is dull. The characters are duller. It’s visually unimaginative, and there are few actual secrets of which to speak (one reveal from the last entry is mildly clarified, but that’s about it). Where its predecessor, The Crimes of Grindelwald, was built around a messy anti-climax — characters chase each other helter-skelter for two hours, only to eventually stand around yelling plot twists — this one falls apart much sooner, to the point that it has to introduce a whole new magical conceit in order to justify how haphazard the whole thing truly is.
Warner Bros. appears to have buyer’s remorse when it comes to this series. The posters all minimize the “Fantastic Beasts” part of the title (in favor of the “Secrets of Dumbledore” subtitle), but since it continues to be a linear franchise, it doesn’t have the luxury of giving its main characters the boot. A year after the events of the first film, awkward Magi-zoologist Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne) is back, as is his stone-faced brother Theseus (Callum Turner) and his Muggle friend — excuse me, “No-Maj” friend — the delightful baker Jacob Kowalski (Dan Fogler), even though none of them really has any reason to be. The larger plot, about the rise of Wizard fascist Gellert Grindelwald (Mads Mikkelsen) and the woes of young Albus Dumbledore (Jude Law), has moved far beyond them, and barely requires their involvement in any legible way. Series regular Tina Goldstein (Katherine Waterston) isn’t in this movie beyond a fleeting cameo despite co-leading the last two, and her reduced role doesn’t make one iota of difference (kudos to Waterston’s agent, by the way). Then again, given the way the movie is constructed, you could just as easily remove title character Dumbledore from the equation and little would change. It’s a bad sign when not a single character feels integral to your ensemble fantasy film. It’s worse to not even try to justify including any of them in the first place, but the roster of magicians isn’t the only thing that feels on autopilot.
The only half-important development occurs in the opening scene, in which — after 15 years of self-congratulatory authorial statements without much to show for it in the text — Dumbledore explicitly professes that he was once in love with Grindelwald. From there on out, things tumble downhill. A newborn magical deer known as a “Qilin” is at the center of an incoherent nighttime chase. Newt is protecting it for some reason — a reason beyond his love for animals, that is — while the bitter Credence Barebone (Ezra Miller), now a henchman for Grindelwald, is in pursuit. Why? Well, nothing is really clear in the moment, setting the stage for a film defined by vague character objectives on all sides and at every turn. The very act of following the story quickly becomes a passive affair. Some people’s motivations are eventually clarified, though only through verbal explanation well after the fact, and at least three major characters are at the center of 180-degree turns that feel triggered by the flip of a switch. One of these characters even 180s a second time; the reasoning is just as flimsy. Steve Kloves, who wrote all but one of the Harry Potter films, returns to the franchise and shares screenplay credit with J.K. Rowling, so references to previous movies arrive in even greater numbers, but the script often feels like it was written by a plot-twist-generating algorithm.
The magical baby deer is representative of a few central, nagging problems, even though it barely features on screen. For one thing, it serves a typically Rowling purpose — which is to say, a completely logistical one that circumvents the need for recognizable ethos. In a creative decision that mirrors the climax of her novel The Deathly Hallows (in which Harry Potter defeats Voldemort on a magical, wand-centric technicality, rather than anything dealing with their beliefs or actions), it turns out that this Qilin has a role in selecting wizard-dom’s new magical leader. This proves to be an issue because the overarching plot concerns Grindelwald being cleared of his crimes and standing for a major election at the last second. Numerous allusions are drawn to the rise of Adolf Hitler, and the specter of Donald Trump isn’t far from the film’s purview, but it has no actual politics of which to speak, since it’s only nominally about people choosing to throw support behind an authoritarian. It never needs Grindelwald to express what he believes through words or actions — i.e. his supposed bigotry against Muggles, largely referenced by other characters — since the election comes down to the specifics of a mystical ceremony, rather than anything akin to a real-world process where people’s voices and opinions matter. It rarely feels like there’s an actual “Wizarding World” beyond the confines of the set, let alone one with actual perspectives and moving political parts.
In addition, the baby Qilin is also turned into a quick fix for another major problem, though it doesn’t work as intended. In an early scene, bits of dialogue that feel hastily reshot reveal that this animal can also help predict the future. Ignoring the fact that Grindelwald already had this ability in the last film (it brings me no pleasure to report that his ludicrous skull bong does not make an appearance), this power is then retrofitted into an exchange in which Dumbledore, Newt, Theseus, Jacob, Newt’s one-note assistant Bunty (Victoria Yeates), and the upbeat newcomer Professor Hicks (Jessica Williams) discuss their vague plan to thwart Grindelwald’s equally vague plan. In what seems to be an exciting story promise, the heroes soon realize they’re up against a villain who can predict their every move, so they have to be especially unpredictable when they take action against him, in ways that may not always make sense. However, neither this potentially interesting approach, nor the fact that Grindelwald now has the power of foresight, ever come up again, and his ability is only demonstrated through lopsided visual effects that appear to have been awkwardly shoved into Mikkelsen’s scenes without much prior planning. This leaves the little deer’s secondary function feeling distinctly like it was tacked on in post-production, as a retroactive excuse for why the movie is a complete and utter mess.
Jacob, at one point, even jokingly claims to be confused about what the heroes’ objective actually is. This lampshading doesn’t help, because there is no actual objective. There are only self-contained set pieces — a prison escape, an assassination attempt, and so on — in between which the characters regroup before splitting up again. The Secrets of Dumbledore is almost always divided between half a dozen subplots, none of which feel as if they’re of any consequence unless they happen to unfold somewhere in Grindelwald’s vicinity. The scattered story pieces rarely add up, and they only serve to keep the characters occupied until the election draws near.
In another instance of technicality superseding character, Dumbledore’s little doohickey from the previous film — a pendant containing a blood oath preventing him and Grindelwald from attacking one another — quickly becomes a convenient stand-in for real hesitance and complicated feelings, and it ceases to be a hurdle just as quickly and conveniently. There are, however, a small handful of moments where it appears director David Yates has a dramatic interest in Dumbledore and Jacob, but neither they nor any of the other characters have anything resembling an interesting trajectory (Dumbledore isn’t on screen long enough to have one, despite the movie bearing his name and running over 140 minutes; Mikkelsen is a worthy addition, but Grindelwald suffers similarly). Yates, who directed the final four Potter films — each one better than the last — also ends up visually restrained by the fact that there’s just not very much magic in this story. For the most part, whether the story is set in America, Germany, or Bhutan, there’s rarely a difference between the magical and non-magical spaces — a distinction that was once the series’ entire conceit — and the beasts aren’t all that fantastical either. A bigger deer, a bigger scorpion, and so on.
Every location is plain and grey, and while the muted visual palette occasionally works — for instance, when re-introducing a heartbroken Jacob — it leaves most of the film looking and feeling drab even when it ought to be exciting. There’s so much dead air that feels like it should be filled with whimsy, so many silences that feel like they ought to be filled with wonder, or even supernatural danger. Instead, everything feels incomplete, as if the people making the series want to leave its magical premise behind, but they have nothing with which to replace it.
Jacob is perhaps the closest thing to an actual protagonist, but his recruitment has nothing to do with the drama at his core: his betrayal by Queenie (Alison Sudol) when she joined forces with Grindelwald, a plot point approached and resolved just as casually and un-challengingly as everything else. Jacob’s function, instead of anything rooted in his story, is simply to be an audience POV character for long-time adult viewers (he’s even gifted a prop wand). Therein lies the film’s fatal flaw: it feels aimed at grown-up Potter fans despite being distinctly juvenile in its conception. Despite its focus on politics, it’s completely apolitical, with a plot that centers on three potential wizard leaders without actually framing or expressing any of their beliefs — including those of its central villain. Constant fuss is made over why Grindelwald is the wrong kind of leader, but in Rowling’s world, there’s no right kind of leader for contrast. The right leader is simply the least disruptive one.
The Secrets of Dumbledore maintains the series’ continuity, but only in the most superficial, goldfish-memory sense. It brings back familiar characters like Newt, Theseus, and Yusuf Kama (William Nadylan), but none of them behave as if Grindelwald recently murdered someone they love (Zoe Kravitz’s Leta Lestrange, at the end of the previous film). Few characters have anything resembling real human emotions or motivations, because their purpose isn’t to be real people, but rather to assist in the slow forward crawl of a plot whose pieces can be reassembled in practically any combination without the big picture really changing. As for the “secret” of the title — concerning Credence, whose real name was revealed to be Aurelius Dumbledore in the last film — the less said about it the better, but were you to stumble across a spoiler for it online, it would probably read like a practical joke by virtue of being utterly inconsequential.
You could end the series here and little of value would be lost. What remains, by the time The Secrets of Dumbledore comes to a close, is merely the promise of watching the same patch of grey paint continuing to dry over two more entries. Please. No more.
from IGN Reviews https://ift.tt/xkveLIj
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