Movie Review: 'Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them'
By Bill Wine
KYW Newsradio
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) - We've long since been Potter-trained, and happily so, what with eight Harry Potter flicks behind us.
But now we get a spin-off from Harry's creator, J.K. Rowling, that might be kicking off another interconnected, family-friendly franchise – apparently with at least four more entries on deck.
That, of course, will depend on whether audiences feel that this first and perhaps only installment delivers up to the standards of the Harry Potter series.
The judgment from this corner: not quite, squared.
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is a Harry Potter prequel of sorts, a fanciful adventure fantasy about a fictitious British author.
He's Newt Scamander (a pseudonym for Rowling) and he's a member of New York's secret society of wizards and witches.
Oscar winner Eddie Redmayne (The Danish Girl) stars as Scamander, under the direction of David Yates, who directed the final four Harry Potter movies.
And how are the films connected?
By a book purported to be Harry's copy of a tome of the same name as this film, mentioned in the first installment in the on-screen series, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, as a wizarding textbook used at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.
Whereas all the other Harry Potter flicks were adapted by other screenwriters, Rowling herself adapted her book for this one and wrote the screenplay, her first.
Newt, ever the eccentric outsider, is a "magizoologist" globetrotting in 1926 who comes to New York while managing an amazing array of beastly, troublemaking creatures that emerge from his ever-present suitcase.
Are Newt's creatures, currently banned in prohibition-era New York, to blame for distressing terrorism problems or is something even more sinister afoot?
Seemingly lighthearted, Rowling's latest creation has timely, dark, serious-minded undercurrents, with post-millennial issues of the last century reflecting our contemporary concerns. The theme of intolerance and prejudice, for example, is part of the subtext.
And Rowling's ability to orchestrate a fully detailed universe is once again on display.
However, FBAWTFT works far better as a setup for what is presumably to come than as a stand-alone adventure. And that's because neither the humans nor the beasts are paricularly fantastic nor memorable.
The "Muggles," those folks not blessed with magic whom we got to know in the U. K. are now known as "No-Majs" – as in "no magic" -- in the U.S.
Newt teams up with kindhearted No-Maj Jacob Kowalski, a baker played by Dan Fogler, and deskbound Magical Congress worker Tina Goldstein, a witch played by Katherine Waterston, as well as her free-spirited sister, Queenie, a mind-reading witch played by Alison Sudol.
And Colin Farrell plays Percival Graves, the powerful director of Magical Security.
The theme of fear of "the other" runs all the way through FBAWTFT, as the wizards and their beasts are immediately blamed for all sorts of things, including creating a virtual wall of destruction.
And Newt has nothing but affection for these exotic creatures whom others find ugly or dangerous or both, but which he arrives to research and catalog and rescue while dark forces push the wizarding and No-Maj worlds to the brink of war.
FBAWTFT is nothing if not crowded and busy. That's both good and bad.
But the biggest problem with the film is the seemingly endless supply of special effects: the lengthy middle section is so special effects-driven that it nearly obscures the charm and vitality of the early and late reels. The enchanted critters are given short shrift, as are the gaggle of subplots. And Redmayne plays his character as so retiring, he's hardly there.
There are also chase scenes and slapstick bits, as well as cameos by the likes of Jon Voight and Johnny Depp, among others. But the price paid for this scattered approach is a loss of clarity and narrative momentum.
More turns out to be less here.
Perhaps we've been spoiled by the Harry Potter films, but it's difficult not to see this overstuffed, spun-off resurrection of Pottermania as falling short.
So we'll open our suitcase and let out 2 stars out of 4. As cinematic abracadabra goes, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them doesn't cast much of a spell.
