'Fantastic' visuals dominate overlong 'Potter' prequel
Consider “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them” to be Harry Potter Lite, artificially sweetened with fewer dramatic calories to burn.
Hardcore Harry Potter fans should find this film - written by novelist J.K. Rowling herself - a digestible movie morsel to satisfy a craving for wizard fantasy since the original film series ended five years ago.
“Fantastic Beasts” (the title comes from a Hogwarts wizarding textbook) teases us with the audio-Pavlovian opening notes to John Williams' Potter theme. What follows is a whole new world.
Actually, what follows is a whole older world, 1926 New York City during Prohibition.
Ministry of Magic employee Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne) arrives from Great Britain, smuggling in a beat-up, TARDIS-like suitcase full of creatures, all of whom escape and create havoc.
More important, they threaten to reveal the existence of wizards to the “no-majs,” the less-endearing American word for “muggles.”
Newt recruits a comical no-maj sidekick in Jacob Kowalski (Dan Folger, a 21st-century Jackie Gleason in a good way), a wannabe baker working at a cannery.
As they chase the fantastic beasts - among them a cute marsupial/platypus hybrid and a giant golden Thunderbird - Tina Goldstein (Katherine Waterston) seeks to nab the smuggler and be reinstated as an “auror” at MACUSA, the Magical Congress of the United States of America, headed by President Seraphina (Carmen Ejogo).
Rounding up the beasts turns out of be something of a Hitchcockian macguffin, for the far darker and more sinister real plot revolves around the murderous Gellert Grindelwald, being groomed as the next he-who-shall-not-be-named ubervillain, along with a stormy, destructive entity called an Obscurus, taking bites out of the Big Apple.
“Fantastic Beasts” presciently addresses xenophobic tensions against “outsiders.” Samantha Morton's puritanical zealot Mary Lou (appearing as if she just came out of auditions for “The Crucible”) not only persecutes magic folk, she takes her hatred out on her severely abused, adopted maj son Credence (Ezra Miller).
Meanwhile, Tina's alluring, mind-reading sister Queenie (Alison Sudol) succumbs to Kowalski's bumbling charm, with Colin Farrell's power-hungry MACUSA official rounding out the main cast.
Redmayne plays Newt as a wizardly Mickey Mouse, a vaguely likable but edgeless, well-meaning good guy. He shares enjoyable interactions with Folger and Waterston, but they lack the incendiary chemistry that came easily to Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint.
David Yates, who directed the last four “Potter” episodes, presides once more over this glossy, high-production-value fantasy that, at 133 minutes, feels bloated and flabby.
Where visual effects served the story and characters in the “Potter” series, here they tend to bully them, lurching from one big computer-generated set piece to the next.
In a case of bad timing, the climactic magical reconstruction of a demolished New York City recalls the much bolder, visually inventive (and similar) climax from Marvel's “Doctor Strange.”
It's one more reason why “Fantastic Beasts” seems less an extension of Harry Potter's universe than a Hollywood attempt to lay the foundation for another standard-issue, visual effects-laden franchise.
One down, four more announced installments to go.
“Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them”
★ ★ ½
Starring: Eddie Redmayne, Katherine Waterston, Dan Fogler, Alison Sudol, Ezra Miller, Samantha Morton, Jon Voight, Carmen Ejogo, Colin Farrell
Directed by: David Yates
Other: A Warner Bros. release. Rated PG-13 for violence. 133 minutes