There is plenty of spell-casting and wand-waving in Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, the second in a planned five-film series from director David Yates and writer J.K. Rowling. Whether there is much genuine magic is another matter. On occasion, Yates’ visual flair and Rowling’s boundless imagination combine to show you something truly wonderful and dazzling: winged horses pulling a carriage through lashing rain; a lionlike creature with wide eyes and a whirling pink tail storming through Paris; a circle of brilliant-blue flames walling off an army of advancing soldiers. Most of the time, however, the magic on display is of a more earthbound sort, akin to a charlatan’s rudimentary illusions. The Crimes of Grindelwald is very loud and busy, but its noise and energy seem designed to distract you from what’s really happening. It’s the classic shell game writ large and in CGI; focus on the blurs of motion and the blasts of sound, and you can’t see the movie’s fundamental emptiness.
Among the many achievements of Rowling’s Harry Potter novels (and their filmed adaptations) was their deft balance between—to borrow terms from TV criticism—the episodic and the serialized; each told a compelling story with a discrete dilemma and a particular villain while also continually developing the central characters and steadily progressing toward an ultimate, good-vs.-evil showdown. The Crimes of Grindelwald, by contrast, seems entirely invested in setting the table for future installments, cautiously arranging chess pieces without moving them anywhere interesting. Following a reasonably suspenseful, somewhat indiscernible prologue in which the dastardly Gellert Grindelwald (Johnny Depp, perfectly fine) escapes from the custody of magical law enforcement in the night sky amid a thunderstorm, the movie begins with Grindelwald poised to topple the social wizarding order. It ends in pretty much the same place. The meaty stuff, it appears, will be served later; this is just a lengthy appetizer.
This does not quite mean that nothing happens. Much like its overstuffed predecessor, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, The Crimes of Grindelwald is crammed with plot and characters, and sorting through its many revelations requires a rigorous attention span as well as a doctorate in Potter lore. As promised, we meet a youngish Albus Dumbledore, portrayed by Jude Law with the proper combination of impishness and sagacity. We know that he’ll eventually become Hogwarts’ venerable headmaster, but here Dumbledore is still just a well-liked professor—the year is around 1930, with the action transitioning from America back to a magic-infused Europe—and while everyone speaks in hushed tones about his ongoing feud with Grindelwald, he spends most of this movie on the periphery. Instead, our primary hero is once again Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne, still appropriately awkward), the timid wizard who seems to care more for and about strange creatures than humans. (In fact, he’d probably reprimand me for that statement because, as he’s fond of repeating, “There are no strange creatures, only blinkered people.”) Dumbledore dispatches Newt to Paris, tasking him to protect Credence (Ezra Miller), the unwitting antagonist of the last movie who is currently in hiding, and whom Grindelwald is rumored to be recruiting as part of his enduring quest for power.
What is Credence’s true identity? The Crimes of Grindelwald spends an alarming amount of time exploring that question, a preoccupation that is irritating for multiple reasons. To begin with, Rowling’s script is inordinately concerned with genealogy, correlating her characters’ magical prowess to their lineage. To be fair, she tends to hardwire this mania into her villains; Voldemort’s bigotry was rooted in his obsession with bloodlines, and Grindelwald similarly covets Credence as an ally because of the mysterious circumstances of his birth. No, what’s really frustrating is that The Crimes of Grindelwald is so heavily fixated on its own bloodlines, in that it repeatedly calls back to familiar figures in the Potterverse.
This should not really be a surprise; the very existence of the Fantastic Beasts pictures is essentially a form of fan service, a gift from a benevolent creator to her adoring followers who never wanted the party—the midnight releases, the message-board conjecture, the cosplay—to end. Yet Rowling’s insistence on tethering these movies to her prior (and, at least thus far, much better) work squanders their potential, robbing them of the chance to feel exciting or new. It also invites the audience to play a strange sort of word-association game, instantly speculating on how each key new face fits into the Potter canon. Newt’s former love interest (Zoë Kravitz) has the surname Lestrange, a moniker that instantly brands her as a figure of importance and a likely harbinger of evil. Another new character is called Nagini (Claudia Kim), and you can guess what kind of reptile she shape-shifts into. And when we meet a very elderly man, some Potter fans may be delighted to see the alchemist Nicolas Flamel in the flesh, but newcomers will likely be confounded. So it goes throughout. Rather than writing on a thrillingly blank slate, Rowling is just filling in the gaps.
This isn’t problematic in itself; all prequels rely to some extent on the linkage to their previously constructed worlds, and that degree of connection doesn’t automatically render them meaningless. But The Crimes of Grindelwald struggles to carve out any real personality of its own. Yates, who in directing the final four Harry Potter adaptations proved remarkably adept at conjuring bristling physical realities that matched Rowling’s verbal inventiveness, remains suitably capable of integrating digital beings into the natural realm; much like Newt, the movie seems most comfortable and confident when cavorting with the animal and the otherworldly. But apart from a new arrival called a zouwu—a whirling dervish of a creature with childlike eyes, a mile-long whip of a tail, and a penchant for all things shiny—the beasts themselves are less fantastic this time around. A sequence where Newt rides a giant seahorse-like water-dweller in a pond plays like second-rate James Cameron, while a pack of feline sentries look startlingly fake. Even the adorable, thieving niffler doesn’t steal quite as many scenes.
In theory, the franchise’s shift away from the fantastical and toward the personal should be a boon, as ordinarily I’d be more than happy to sacrifice scenes of computer-generated organisms in exchange for more time with the flesh-and-blood sort. Unfortunately, the humans who populate the Fantastic Beasts universe remain disappointingly one-dimensional. Newt is still a gratifyingly unconventional hero, but Redmayne’s hunched diffidence is starting to slip into shtick, and he has nobody interesting to play off of. Circumstances conspire to reunite Newt with Jacob (Dan Fogler), the bumbling “no-maj” who in the prior film fell into a sweet, clandestine love affair with the witch Queenie (Alison Sudol), but while Jacob previously served as a logical surrogate for our awestruck wonder, now he’s just a hopeless drag; the friendship between the two misfit men is clunky and unpersuasive, failing to work as either a buddy-comedy or a warm display of male camaraderie. Newt also still nurses a tentative crush on Queenie’s sister, Tina (Katherine Waterston), but their fledgling romance is complicated by a dreadfully contrived misunderstanding. There are numerous other characters—Newt has a strapping brother, Tina spies a professional rival—who possess little color, while the aforementioned Lestrange seems to exist only to provide not one but two lengthy flashbacks, which operate solely as clumsy info-dumps.
And then there is Grindelwald, and to the extent this sequel is memorable at all, its intrigue lies in how it contemplates its big bad’s wizard-supremacy rhetoric in the age of Brexit and America First. Underplaying the part, Depp makes Grindelwald a figure of eerie menace rather than openly snarling evil. But when the camera follows him out to a dais in the middle of a coliseum, where he preaches a ghoulish fantasy of the wizarding world annihilating its Muggle counterparts, it doesn’t take much imagination to shift the venue from Paris to Mississippi and to change the music from James Newton Howard’s sinister score to a blaring recording of “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”.
There’s a disquieting kick to that image, and to those blue flames that blast into the innocent crowd soon after. But any force of Rowling’s allegory is blunted by the thinness of her characters; it’s intellectual, not emotional. Perhaps future Fantastic Beasts episodes will clarify this muddled picture, but The Crimes of Grindelwald is over. And as Dumbledore once told Harry Potter, no spell can reawaken the dead.
Jeremy Beck is the editor-in-chief of MovieManifesto. He watches more movies and television than he probably should.