'The Crimes Of Grindelwald' Is More Muddled, More Dutiful: NPR

Hands up, everyone who liked Harry Potter series – books and / or movies – at least well enough.

OK, well, that's a lot of you.

Keep them up if you made it all the way through 2016's Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them – a prequel to the canonical Potter stories, in which Eddie Redmayne played magizoologist Newt Scamander, who came to New York City in 1926 with a magical suitcase and an annoying, squirrelly affect.

Hunh. Thought that would eliminate more than you did it.

Okay, now only keep them up if you're coming away from Fantastic Beasts disappointed. If you liked the setting – the so-called Wizarding World, U.S. edition – but felt the story has meandering, muddled, overstuffed mess that leaned too hard on the cutesy-wutesy magical critters. If you have some of the stylistic flourishes of Harry Potter, but none of the distinctive particulars, none of feel, none – let's just get this out of the way – of the magic.

Okay. Now. If your hand is not up, you're excused. This is not about J.K. Rowling's world, or you're so committed to it Fantastic Beasts was a cinematic Obscurus – an noisy ball of violent, nonsensical narrative chaos, albeit one that did boffo B.O.

So off with you. Everyone else? The ones still sticking around? Here's the scoop.

The Crimes of Grindelwald is better than the first Beasts film, and not just because it turns out to be such a low bar to clear, but because it has a firmer grasp on what kind of movie it wants to be. It feels more familiar with Potter-y, in which it assumes the distinctive narrative shape of Harry Potter stories.

Once again: Structurally, it's familiar, not, you know: Good.

Can we admit, here, that the plots of Harry Potter books and movies were always frustrating in the extreme? Rowling's characters delighted in keeping vital information from Harry – and by extension, the reader – turning every tale into an ersatz, low-rent mystery where the goal was never to uncover whodunnit, but to eke out even the most basic understanding of whatthehellsgoingon? Inevitably, we'd discover the answers – well, "discover" is inaccurate. We'd be ToldWhen Rowling would finally sit down, Harry would have to sit back and say a few words.

That's the kind of plotting The Crimes of Grindelwald to go to a hilariously out-of-nowhere pseudo-climactic scene in which characters have you spent the movie scheming to murder one another just stand around listening to a series of monologues like they're sleepy kindergartners at storytime.

No, it does not work. No, it's not, not even a little bit, Good. But it's familiar.

It's actually an improvement, a very small, specific way. You'll remember that all things are kept going by Harry and his friends because it's all over the place. Magical To be sure, but even so: They would learn something, jump to the wrong conclusion, and proceed to the task of misinformation until the penultimate chapter, when someone (usually Dumbledore) would finally explain the situation in full. Rinse, repeat. Accio annoyance.

There's none of that here, at least.

Eddie Redmayne's New Scamander is an adult, and he finds things out using magic. There's a cool sequence when he reconstructs a crime scene using a glittery gold magical powder – pixiedusting for fingerprints, as it were. This time out, the sheer number of putative hilarious beasts on the market, but the ones who do turn up tend to be used strategically, to bring about some concrete result, instead of simply a way to the movie's Whimsy Quotient .

Redmayne's performance, as Newt, remains just as mannered and tic-ridden as ever. But how to a brief flashback sequence featuring a teenage Newt played by Joshua Shea, who gamely matches Redmayne's every stealthy head-tilt and skittering glance, it seems less hammy and indulgent, and more defined, characterizing choice.

Of course, one of the main reasons that Grindelwald works better than the movie that is a function of its status as the middle movie of a trilogy. The business of world-building, which the first film made such a corned-beef hash of, is over, and there is only the task of moving the various characters across the board like the wizard's chess pieces they are. As such, it has a more singular sense of purpose, as all the meandering subplots of the movie

The plot, such as it is: Young Dumbledore (Jude Law) sends Newt to Paris, where a newly escaped Grindelwald (Johnny Depp) is gathering his faithful – pure-blood wizards – in an attempt to rule both the Wizarding world and the human world. Meanwhile, Ezra Miller's (checks notes) Barebone Credence is … (checks notes again, frowns, shrugs) … Barebone Credence is also in Paris, searching for his mother, along with the girlfriend of Nagini (Claudia Kim) in Maledictus cursed to one day turn into a snake. (Yes).

Also there's love-interest stuff: Newt and his girlfriend Aurora Tina (Katherine Waterston) are misunderstanding what could be clarified with a ten-second conversation, but is not, because Rowling gonna Rowling. Newt's pals Jacob (Dan Fogler) and Queenie (Alison Sudol, doing a lot with one of the movie's many underwritten roles for women) show up, and the script puts feel like narrative progress.

The film's chief problem is Grindelwald, a dull-as-dishwater villain we are repeatedly told to be charming and deceitful, yet Depp's performance fights hard against any such reading. The character of Grindelwald is Supposed to use guile and rhetoric to win wizards to their side by promising them the chance to "live openly, and love freely" – a not-particularly coy attempt by the screenplay to underline the gay subtext between Grindelwald and Law's Hot Dumbledore – goal Depp just hams it up like a pantomime baddie.

Everything about the guy is second-rate. Voldemort had disquieting where his nose should be; Grindelwald has single, discolored iris. When Voldemort summoned His followers in a skull with a snake slithering through its eye-sockets manifested in the sky: That wizard had style. When Grindelwald attempts the same move, the buildings of Paris simply get shadowy tarps thrown over them; it's unclear if he's calling an army or renovating masonry.

So, now. All of you who stuck around? Take it easy. Grindelwald is a better, more purposeful and thus more propulsive film than the first, and it has its unique charms: Harry Potter tales pop up here, appreciative gasps from the audience in the process. The sight of Hogwarts, accompanied by John Williams' fanfare, elicits applause.

And not for nothing? Law looks great as a Dumbledore in bespoke tweedFantastic Vests and Where to Find Them!), even if it was going to be put together in the future, just in the shapeless dresses and chunky jewelry waiting To turn him into the Wizarding World's equivalent of a Santa Fe gallery owner named Jade.