"Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them" review

Still looking for the fantastic this film promised to help me find.

The “Harry Potter” craze may have ended a meager 5 years ago but it almost feels like a lifetime ago.

Even after the legend of the wizard boy who lived wrapped up cinematically, the franchise has left behind a void upon Hollywood that its Young Adult oriented brethren have relentlessly continued to fill with varying degrees of success.

Disregarding the lightning in a bottle captured by the series for being the right level of inventive at the right time for a multitude of demographics, “Harry Potter” succeeded where its many pretenders failed through a sincerity in storytelling that’s practically endangered throughout every medium of the entertainment industry.

Its lore was hinted to be far vaster than what was depicted by its individual installments but every concept directly introduced existed for the sole purpose of advancing the storytelling. Marketing and self service be damned; it was a character driven narrative about kids coming of age, dealing with issues that few adults even have come face to face with and all of its physically unveiled mythos was designed to directly impact the road of their growth and evolution.

This series managed to go through 8 films based on 7 books helmed by 4 different directors and its quality and earnestness never faltered once.

That’s what makes the blatantly studio driven nature and market focused makeup of “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them” so painful to sit through.

Set decades before the titular franchise characters adventures in magic school, the film follows magical zoologist Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne), as he travels abroad to study the mystical animals of the wizarding world in hopes of educating his people about them in order to decrease the fear mongering surrounding communities of their potential dangers. His research goes on to become the in-universe text book used in wizard schools by the time of Harry’s tenure at Hogwarts and this story in particular focuses on his time chasing creatures through 1920s New York City.

He’s joined by the non-magical Jacob Kowalski (Dan Fogler) and Magical Congress officer Tina Goldstein (Katherine Waterson) on a quest to gather them while maintaining a low profile so as to not expose their secret culture to the timid and fragile outside world.

Director David Yates, helming the entire latter half of the series, returns to direct a screenplay written by series scribe J.K. Rowling herself. Their experience and insight on the property helps a universe that’s been packed away for nearly half a decade confidently strut what it has to offer as if it never went away to begin with.

Scamander’s international journey with political repercussions help to show a more adult side of the setting that could barely even be hinted at within the context of the younger skewed “Harry Potter” novels and movies and the fascinating depiction of its inner workings as presented by the people that clearly understand the property best is natural and providing of some of the film’s best content.

The themes of standing against xenophobia, the failings of bureaucracy in the justice department, even abuse and the psychological damages of self-loathing as presented here are almost as powerful to see unfold as the titular beasts are to watch in all of their glory, with so many little details to keep track of you’d think it was meant to be viewed frame by frame.

These themes and visuals are bolstered by the excellent low key performances of a masterfully chosen cast that never lose your investment through all of the movie’s highs and lows. If only the actual story that they were featured in could get its act together.

Within Scamander’s search for his beloved creatures, there is revealed to be a seedy conspiracy with America’s magical government that seeks to take advantage of potential tensions between magical and non-magical beings not dissimilar to those existing between historically disenfranchised and the majority race in power.

It’s a dark subplot that leads the film into daring new territories that have absolutely nothing to do with the plot of the film itself, serving only to rear the head of commercialism that’s been nipping at this series’ heals for years by dumping in plot threads for future films.

The age of post-credit stingers and cinematic universes that we live in have made it hard for studio movies to operate self contained, so I wouldn’t harp on this so much with “Fantastic Beasts” if it wasn’t so obviously there in an effort to serve the brand to the detriment of story quality.

“Fantastic Beasts” bends over backwards to get its heroes on the hunt for the creatures that have been let loose upon New York as though its titular plot thread were the drive of the entire movie, yet immediately frames Scamanders studies and searches as a subplot to a mystery so broken up and so poorly tied into his job that it throws the pacing entirely off. It hurts to watch this because the thread in question isn’t badly conceived and would have served better as the focus of a sequel with just a single thematic idea or so seeded into the movie’s background.

This overreliance on metatextual information that brutally whiplashes the tone of the movie for the sole purpose of milking an extra smile out of hardcore “Harry Potter” fans damages the polished narrative styling and tight focus that the franchise is famous for but above all else, it hurts the movie by just make it occasionally baffling and outright dull.

Moments of emotional height are undercut by a murky story that never quite finds a true rhythm, making the roughly 2 hours and 10 minutes of its 3 or 4 day journey feel more janky and long winded than the stories that are supposed to take place over the course of a 9 month time frame.

And to what extent was any of this necessary? If new “Harry Potter” movies are more or less guaranteed to gross high, why the concern with jamming every plot thread into a single installment?

This primarily concerns me because all of the heart and soul of the movie is born from the beast hunting portions of the film and their foundation should have been used to enhance the darker themes of a more thoroughly developed class warfare mystery. What ultimately happens, is the best part of the film gets high jacked by a tonally incompatible tumor in order to set up a giant copout of a climax that burned away all of the good will I was desperate to give the film.

Die hard “Harry Potter” fans will more than likely have no problem overlooking these flaws and I can’t blame them for a second; the opportunity to visit a whole new side of this world is worth the price of admission alone and the promise that it demonstrates leaves my more creative side bursting with potential stories for this saga and beyond.

I only wish “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them” had the skill and discipline demonstrated by its parent series to achieve even half of that promise rather than opting to be another average studio blockbuster.

5 Mildly Diverting Beasts out of 10