Jude Law and Mads Mikkelsen give the series two grown-ups worth watching, and David Yates surrounds them with a plot that even Dumbledore admits is meant to confuse. Handsome, grey and long, it is a franchise that has misplaced its own beasts.
The third Fantastic Beasts film is 142 minutes long and about an election. Gellert Grindelwald (Mads Mikkelsen) wants to lead the wizarding world and rid it of Muggles, and Albus Dumbledore (Jude Law) cannot stop him himself, because a pact made when they were young means neither can raise a wand against the other. So Dumbledore sends other people. David Yates, who has directed every film in this series and the last four Harry Potter pictures, stages it with care and without much joy. It is tidier than the last one, and we still spent long stretches waiting to be told why any of it mattered.
The two men at the centre are the reason it works when it does. The film opens with Dumbledore and Grindelwald across a table in a London tearoom, talking quietly about the life they once meant to share, and Law and Mikkelsen play it as two old lovers who know exactly how to wound each other. We were moved by it, more than the rest of the film had any right to expect, because for four minutes nobody explains a rule or a prophecy; two people look at each other and regret. Mikkelsen, taking over the part, makes Grindelwald calm and reasonable, a man who never raises his voice because he has never needed to, and the film is better every time he is in it.
The comedy is Dan Fogler’s. Jacob Kowalski is a Muggle baker handed a wand he cannot use and dragged into a war he barely understands, and Fogler plays him with a decency that keeps the film human. His scenes with Alison Sudol’s Queenie, now standing at Grindelwald’s shoulder, are the only strand with a shape you can feel: Jacob still wants her back and Queenie is not sure she has left. Jessica Williams is brisk and funny as Lally Hicks and deserved more of the film than she gets.
Eddie Redmayne, top of the bill, spends much of the running time as a courier for other people’s plot. Newt Scamander gets one good set piece, a rescue from a prison guarded by scorpion-like creatures that must be walked past with a swaying, knock-kneed dance, and Redmayne and Callum Turner, as his brother Theseus, make it the one sequence where the film is properly silly and properly alive. Otherwise the beasts of the title are a side attraction. Katherine Waterston’s Tina appears for what feels like two scenes. Ezra Miller’s Credence, William Nadylam’s Yusuf Kama and Richard Coyle’s Aberforth are each given something to carry and nowhere much to take it.
The script, by Steve Kloves and J.K. Rowling, has an alibi built in. Dumbledore’s plan is meant to confuse Grindelwald, so the audience must be confused too, and the film says as much out loud. That is a licence to leave scenes unexplained, and the film uses it. Mark Day cuts each sequence to end the moment its information has been delivered, so people arrive in Berlin, or at Hogwarts, or on a mountainside, say what they need to, and are gone. We were not bored, exactly. We were unengaged, which is worse, because being bored at least means you wanted something.
It looks expensive and it looks grey. George Richmond shoots Berlin in slate and brown, and even the qilin, whose birth in the rain is the film’s most tender image, comes out silver. Stuart Craig and Neil Lamont build a 1930s Germany of marble halls, torchlit rallies and a wizarding ministry that looks like a railway station, and Colleen Atwood puts everyone in long coats, so the whole film seems to be waiting on a platform. James Newton Howard’s score does the honest work of a sequel, bringing back the old Hogwarts theme when the school appears, and we felt it land and felt slightly managed.
Against the series’ own standard this is an improvement. Against the eight films that came before the series, it is a handsome afterthought. If you watch it, watch it at home, where you can pause and work out who is on whose side; the 12A is right, though the youngest may drift off during the election and not much miss it.
