The pandemic has wounded cinema in all sorts of ways, but the Fantastic Beasts series may prove to be its biggest victim to date. The Harry Potter prequel series would in part have itself to blame: the second instalment, 2018’s distinctly sub-fantastic The Crimes of Grindelwald, wasn’t much more than a hectic brand-extension exercise, and it made ploughing through another three of these things (five in total are planned) a less-than-wizard prospect.
But the havoc seemingly wrought by Covid on this latest part – six months of delays, and by all appearances some drastic on-the-hoof rewrites due to filming and travel restrictions, plus the additional recasting of the villain two months into the shoot following Johnny Depp’s disastrous libel case – leaves you wondering whether Fantastic Beasts 3 will even make it to the end of its own closing credits. Puffing and wheezing through its final stretch, the film contrives a bet-hedging epilogue in which two of the main surviving characters wonder aloud whether they’ll ever be required to team up again. Presumably ticket sales will decide.
The credited writers are JK Rowling and Steve Kloves, who adapted all but one of Rowling’s seven Potter books for the screen, but this film is bereft of the warmth, shimmer and intrigue of Rowling’s novels. Even its clumsy, name-dropping subtitle, The Secrets of Dumbledore, doesn’t sound like it could have come from the same pen as such neck-prickling phrases as ‘The Deathly Hallows’ or ‘The Half-Blood Prince’.
(Speaking of dropped names, Warner Bros’ marketing department saw fit to scrub almost all mention of Rowling from the film’s original trailer – presumably to placate the permanently furious subsection of Twitter who resent the author’s interventions in the ongoing transgender debate. That Rowling herself hasn’t tweeted a word about Fantastic Beasts in more than two years suggests her investment in the series isn’t what it once was.)
Of that uncertain lead pair at the film’s end, it’s no spoiler to reveal that one is Albus Dumbledore himself, the Hogwarts headmaster played in the original Potter films by the late Richard Harris and then Michael Gambon, and here by Jude Law. Law’s attempt at Gambon’s Irish twang comes and goes from scene to scene, one of many signals that the film’s making was less than coherent.
