Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore Movie Review: Looks good but doesn’t feel so

A still from Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore

Film: Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore

Cast: Eddie Redmayne, Jude Law, Mads Mikkelsen, Ezra Miller, Dan Fogler, Alison Sudol, Callum Turner, Jessica Williams, William Nadylam and Katherine Waterston.

Dir: David Yates

Rating: 2.5/5

Runtime: 136 min.

Directed by David Yates (The Crimes of Grindelwald; Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them) from a screenplay by J.K. Rowling and Steve Kloves, based on the former's story, this film basically continues with the adventures of Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne) bridging links between Rowling's famous past and later works.

In an effort to thwart Grindelwald's (Mads Mikkelsen) plans of raising pure-blood wizards to rule over all non-magical beings, Albus Dumbledore (Jude Law) enlists his former student Newt Scamander and his team and basically set-up for a showdown in Bhutan viz. a visit to Hogwarts, the wizard school central to the Harry Potter series. Love and loyalty are tested, new magical beasts are revealed while the audience gets clued in with some backstory about Dumbledore and the villainous Gellert Grindelwald.

The fascinating overdrive of magical moments don't quite make for great coherence. The script feels rather like a series of magic set-pieces strung together without much story to hold it all together. A large number of inconsequential subplots make the going quite difficult to comprehend here. Despite the Potter nostalgia, the free-floating needless sequences make the experience rather tiresome. Yates' flashy directorial inputs, costumer Colleen Atwood's vividly imaginative costumes, Stuart Craig and Neil Lamont's myth inducing production design make for some impressive credits but put together they don't curry fevered interest. Dramatic riches are miniscule here. The actors do their job well but this instalment largely feels like a prep-show for something major to come!