A beastly bore
In the very first scene of Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore, screenwriters J.K. Rowling and Steven Kloves make "Dumbledore is gay" canonical in the Harry Potter universe. At the far side of 142 impossibly unhurried minutes, this will turn out to have been the most consequential narrative development of the film. After three films, this prequel series that nobody really asked for and, it's increasingly clear, nobody actually wanted hasn't exactly been racking up high-stakes narratives full of fast-moving, consequential plot twists, but even by the standards of 2016's agreeably small Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them and 2018's disagreeably... disagreeable Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, it's kind of amazing how little actually happens here.
I will say this in defense of the film: it is considerably more manageable and self-contained than The Crimes of Grindelwald, working very hard to give us all of the backstory we need (almost certainly too hard, in fact; there is a doozy of a "let me tell you the exposition we all already know" scene), while presenting a conflict with a clear beginning, middle, and end that all exist within these same 142 minutes. Indeed, this is better than The Crimes of Grindelwald across pretty much every measure that two very similar films can be compared to each other, since the earlier movie was so bad that even three and a half years later I still can't figure out how so many skilled professionals dropped the ball so hard. But we're here to discuss The Secrets of Dumbledore, not relitigate the astonishing failure of its predecessor, and what happens in The Secrets of Dumbledore, above and beyond everything else, is that the extremely unsubtle Nazi subtext that has been at the heart of every conflict Rowling has ever put into a Wizarding World novel or screenplay has almost ceased to be subtext at all: it's 1932, and a wizard fascist with dreams of racial purity, who has until very recently been considered a dangerous convict, has been welcomed reluctantly back into society at large, and has put himself at the head of a rather gaudy and disreputable minor political party and is now attempting to win an election that will give him something uncomfortably close to absolute power.
This Wizard Hitler is, as we're already meant to know, Gellert Grindelwald (Mads Mikkelsen, replacing Johnny Depp, who took over from Colin Farrell in a twist that I still haven't forgiven), the ex-lover of Albus Dumbledore (Jude Law) who, as we will find out at great length, has secrets. He holds these secrets so close to his chest, in fact, that neither the other characters nor, by extension, the audience get to find out what they are until near the end of the movie. Until that time, we're mostly doing what the rest of them are: waiting around in a cloud of mild confusion, wondering if any of these plot beats are actually leading anywhere in particular, and feeling a bit like it's all so much busywork, more of a way of keeping the beginning of the film separated from the ending, than actually providing us with a compelling and engaging middle.
Those other characters are led by Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne), who was once centered as the protagonist of this spin-off series, and has increasingly come to feel like a vestigial organ. But at least Redmayne himself seems to have shaken off whatever grinding awfulness led him to give the somnambulistic performance he provided last time; he's intermittently fun here, and fun is something The Secrets of Dumbledore needs wherever it can be gotten. The universe Rowling created and then encased in amber is an awfully silly one in some ways: the magical political office that Grindelwald so covets is the Supreme Mugwump, for example. That's a bit of bouncy stupidity that would have fit into the earliest Potter books and films, but sits awkwardly alongside the dour misery of so much of of The Secrets of Dumbledore, which at first glance I'd say must surely count as the cruelest and darkest of the eleven films in this series to date. By the end of the fourth scene, we have seen both a magical deer-lizard and her newborn offspring die onscreen - the baby floating in a gently-spreading cloud of its own blood, no less - and the mere fact that these are somewhat hollow-looking CGI creatures hardly makes it any more pleasant. Later, a massive subterranean beast will disgorge a dead (or dying) human with a heavy splat, as its bones protrude through the thick globs of melted grey tissue that were once organs and skin, leading to several scorpion-crabs to skitter happily over to start happily devouring the hideous gelatinous mound. Also onscreen. I am familiar with the whole "the audience grew up as the characters in the book did" argument, but I think having fairly evocative, grody body horror put front and center in the latest entry in what has always been a family-leaning-children's franchise - one with not only the Supreme Mugwump, but also Cockroach Cluster candies and briefcase full of magical bagels found within its ample runtime - at least feels like somebody wasn't being too mindful of managing the tone of the movie.
Not Rowling and Kloves, and certainly not director David Yates, who now enters Year 15 of being the only person allowed to direct one of these (he's done seven of these in a row now, interrupted only by 2016's long-forgotten The Legend of Tarzan). I think he has never been less interesting, which is different than saying he's never been worse. Compared to The Crimes of Grindelwald, this is downright intelligible. But it is also extremely banal. The profound lack of consequence in the narrative seems to have inspired nobody, not even production designer Stuart Craig, till now the immovable rock upon whom these films could always depend (he is joined in his duties, this time, by Neil Lamont). With few exceptions (the shadowy cavern of the scorpion beasts being the obvious exception), the whole thing looks altogether pedestrian, capturing '30s New York and Berlin in the most boring way possible, and making a Bhutanese village in the shadow of a magical temple on a distant mountain charmless and routine. The cinematography, the effects, the costuming; all a mixture of uninteresting design choices and a rainbow of greys and browns.
The actors are hardly more inspired: Law is still well above-average, but the murkiness of his character's actions give him nothing to grab onto, and he's clearly less excited to find his own take on a beloved role than last time. Redmayne is sometimes good, maybe even more often than not; Dan Fogler is an outright delight as non-magical New York bakery owner Jacob Kowalski, continuing his rise from effective utility player in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them all the way up to being the warm, human heart of this stilted, airless trudge through brand extension. I can think of no nice thing to say about any other performer, other than to give Jessica Williams (playing an American magic professor roped into Dumbledore's cryptic plans) credit for having done the research on a '30s-style transatlantic accent that she's pursuing with such eagerness that you can't entirely fault her for only sometimes finding it.
The whole thing is a dreadful grind: miniscule advances on a grand narrative that's certainly less interesting than simply mucking about in this world seeing what fantastical nonsense can be found there (it's no accident that the most featherweight of the movies, with the least attempt to build out a grand tale of Good and Evil wizards warring in the shadow of normal human events, is all by far the best - the first one, I mean, and it's looking increasingly shocking that it turned out as unobjectionably watchable as it did, given how broken the storytelling goals of this franchise are). It's a soggy, glum, depressing slog through the political machinations of a fake political system, with barely any of even the mediocre spark of otherwordly adventure that has animated the worst bits of this series prior to 2018. The good news is that it's bombing, so we might be spared the agony of a fourth (and fifth!), but what a horrible downfall it has been for what was once, if never the most evocative of modern fantasy film franchises, at least a remarkably reliable one.
Reviews in this series
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Cuarón, 2004)
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Yates, 2007)
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Yates, 2009)
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 (Yates, 2010)
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 (Yates, 2011)
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Yates, 2016)
Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald (Yates, 2018)
Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore (Yates, 2022)
Other films in this series, yet to be reviewed
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (Columbus, 2001)
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Columbus, 2002)
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Newell, 2005)
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
I will say this in defense of the film: it is considerably more manageable and self-contained than The Crimes of Grindelwald, working very hard to give us all of the backstory we need (almost certainly too hard, in fact; there is a doozy of a "let me tell you the exposition we all already know" scene), while presenting a conflict with a clear beginning, middle, and end that all exist within these same 142 minutes. Indeed, this is better than The Crimes of Grindelwald across pretty much every measure that two very similar films can be compared to each other, since the earlier movie was so bad that even three and a half years later I still can't figure out how so many skilled professionals dropped the ball so hard. But we're here to discuss The Secrets of Dumbledore, not relitigate the astonishing failure of its predecessor, and what happens in The Secrets of Dumbledore, above and beyond everything else, is that the extremely unsubtle Nazi subtext that has been at the heart of every conflict Rowling has ever put into a Wizarding World novel or screenplay has almost ceased to be subtext at all: it's 1932, and a wizard fascist with dreams of racial purity, who has until very recently been considered a dangerous convict, has been welcomed reluctantly back into society at large, and has put himself at the head of a rather gaudy and disreputable minor political party and is now attempting to win an election that will give him something uncomfortably close to absolute power.
This Wizard Hitler is, as we're already meant to know, Gellert Grindelwald (Mads Mikkelsen, replacing Johnny Depp, who took over from Colin Farrell in a twist that I still haven't forgiven), the ex-lover of Albus Dumbledore (Jude Law) who, as we will find out at great length, has secrets. He holds these secrets so close to his chest, in fact, that neither the other characters nor, by extension, the audience get to find out what they are until near the end of the movie. Until that time, we're mostly doing what the rest of them are: waiting around in a cloud of mild confusion, wondering if any of these plot beats are actually leading anywhere in particular, and feeling a bit like it's all so much busywork, more of a way of keeping the beginning of the film separated from the ending, than actually providing us with a compelling and engaging middle.
Those other characters are led by Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne), who was once centered as the protagonist of this spin-off series, and has increasingly come to feel like a vestigial organ. But at least Redmayne himself seems to have shaken off whatever grinding awfulness led him to give the somnambulistic performance he provided last time; he's intermittently fun here, and fun is something The Secrets of Dumbledore needs wherever it can be gotten. The universe Rowling created and then encased in amber is an awfully silly one in some ways: the magical political office that Grindelwald so covets is the Supreme Mugwump, for example. That's a bit of bouncy stupidity that would have fit into the earliest Potter books and films, but sits awkwardly alongside the dour misery of so much of of The Secrets of Dumbledore, which at first glance I'd say must surely count as the cruelest and darkest of the eleven films in this series to date. By the end of the fourth scene, we have seen both a magical deer-lizard and her newborn offspring die onscreen - the baby floating in a gently-spreading cloud of its own blood, no less - and the mere fact that these are somewhat hollow-looking CGI creatures hardly makes it any more pleasant. Later, a massive subterranean beast will disgorge a dead (or dying) human with a heavy splat, as its bones protrude through the thick globs of melted grey tissue that were once organs and skin, leading to several scorpion-crabs to skitter happily over to start happily devouring the hideous gelatinous mound. Also onscreen. I am familiar with the whole "the audience grew up as the characters in the book did" argument, but I think having fairly evocative, grody body horror put front and center in the latest entry in what has always been a family-leaning-children's franchise - one with not only the Supreme Mugwump, but also Cockroach Cluster candies and briefcase full of magical bagels found within its ample runtime - at least feels like somebody wasn't being too mindful of managing the tone of the movie.
Not Rowling and Kloves, and certainly not director David Yates, who now enters Year 15 of being the only person allowed to direct one of these (he's done seven of these in a row now, interrupted only by 2016's long-forgotten The Legend of Tarzan). I think he has never been less interesting, which is different than saying he's never been worse. Compared to The Crimes of Grindelwald, this is downright intelligible. But it is also extremely banal. The profound lack of consequence in the narrative seems to have inspired nobody, not even production designer Stuart Craig, till now the immovable rock upon whom these films could always depend (he is joined in his duties, this time, by Neil Lamont). With few exceptions (the shadowy cavern of the scorpion beasts being the obvious exception), the whole thing looks altogether pedestrian, capturing '30s New York and Berlin in the most boring way possible, and making a Bhutanese village in the shadow of a magical temple on a distant mountain charmless and routine. The cinematography, the effects, the costuming; all a mixture of uninteresting design choices and a rainbow of greys and browns.
The actors are hardly more inspired: Law is still well above-average, but the murkiness of his character's actions give him nothing to grab onto, and he's clearly less excited to find his own take on a beloved role than last time. Redmayne is sometimes good, maybe even more often than not; Dan Fogler is an outright delight as non-magical New York bakery owner Jacob Kowalski, continuing his rise from effective utility player in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them all the way up to being the warm, human heart of this stilted, airless trudge through brand extension. I can think of no nice thing to say about any other performer, other than to give Jessica Williams (playing an American magic professor roped into Dumbledore's cryptic plans) credit for having done the research on a '30s-style transatlantic accent that she's pursuing with such eagerness that you can't entirely fault her for only sometimes finding it.
The whole thing is a dreadful grind: miniscule advances on a grand narrative that's certainly less interesting than simply mucking about in this world seeing what fantastical nonsense can be found there (it's no accident that the most featherweight of the movies, with the least attempt to build out a grand tale of Good and Evil wizards warring in the shadow of normal human events, is all by far the best - the first one, I mean, and it's looking increasingly shocking that it turned out as unobjectionably watchable as it did, given how broken the storytelling goals of this franchise are). It's a soggy, glum, depressing slog through the political machinations of a fake political system, with barely any of even the mediocre spark of otherwordly adventure that has animated the worst bits of this series prior to 2018. The good news is that it's bombing, so we might be spared the agony of a fourth (and fifth!), but what a horrible downfall it has been for what was once, if never the most evocative of modern fantasy film franchises, at least a remarkably reliable one.
Reviews in this series
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Cuarón, 2004)
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Yates, 2007)
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Yates, 2009)
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 (Yates, 2010)
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 (Yates, 2011)
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Yates, 2016)
Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald (Yates, 2018)
Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore (Yates, 2022)
Other films in this series, yet to be reviewed
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (Columbus, 2001)
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Columbus, 2002)
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Newell, 2005)
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
