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The team behind “Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald” throws an awful lot at the screen during this clotted two-hour-plus diversion, the latest installment in the J.K. Rowling-verse. As is often the case in a Rowling production, evil is ascendant, seeping through both human and magic realms like poison gas.
Mostly, though, because Rowling builds worlds, what “Grindelwald” has is a great deal of story. The movie is chockablock with stuff: titular creatures (if not nearly enough), attractive people, scampering extras, eye-catching locations, tragic flashbacks, teary confessions and largely bloodless, spectacular violence. It’s an embarrassment of riches, and it’s suffocating.
The darkness makes a startling contrast to the first movie, which mostly involved a lot of narrative place setting, including all the fun beastly introductions. Most of the characters are back, including Tina (Katherine Waterston), a law-and-order type called an Auror and Newt’s limp romantic foil. One of the disappointments of the “Fantastic Beasts” movies has been the casting, which has little of the wit and powerhouse talent that shored up the Harry Potter series. Redmayne can be a sensitive presence, but when he isn’t well directed his fluttering and darting looks quickly settle into ingratiating shtick. If Newt has any depth, a mewling, quivering Redmayne seems unlikely to tap it.
That the contents of Newt’s suitcase are consistently more interesting than he is remains a problem, too. Rowling keeps trying to make him and the mysterious Credence (Ezra Miller) the narrative’s twinned center. Yet your attention keeps returning, almost longingly, to the movie’s funnier, more charming supporting players, notably Queenie (a delightful Alison Sudol) and Jacob (the equally appealing Dan Fogler). They don’t share Newt’s pedigree or Credence’s ominous threat; they’re side dishes. But they have the charming idiosyncrasies and human frailties of Rowling’s best creations, and they prove to be the ones you care most about.
On the page, Rowling is a master storyteller, creating worlds so richly populated and densely textured that you can easily summon them up in your mind without ever having watched a single adaptation of her work. What occasionally trips her up is plot structure — the arrangement of all her attractive, whirling parts. Steve Kloves, who wrote all but one of the Harry Potter movies, was gifted at giving cinematic shape to Rowling’s increasingly long novels, with all their detours and savory details. Here, however, Rowling has surrendered to her maximalist tendencies and so cluttered up the story that you spend far too much time trying to untangle who did what to whom and why.
Its pedigree and behind-the-scenes talent ensure that “The Crimes of Grindelwald” is scattered with minor pleasures, mostly ornamental — the brassy filigree that summons up old worlds, the stray elf that reminds you of adventures past. There’s also the Zouwu, a charming monster with a catlike face and a long body that whips around like a Chinese New Year dragon, upstaging everyone who shares the screen with it. Yet, by the time Rowling has gathered all her story lines together and a somnolent Zoë Kravitz, as the slinky Leta Lestrange, is guiding you through another digression, the movie has loosened its grip on you. That tightens only when the story tantalizingly shifts to Hogwarts, where Dumbledore, fond memories and the promise of better stories await.
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