From there on out, things tumble downhill. The only half-important development occurs in the opening scene, in which - after 15 years of self-congratulatory authorial statements without much to show for it in the text - Dumbledore explicitly professes that he was once in love with Grindelwald.
It’s worse to not even try to justify including any of them in the first place, but the roster of magicians isn’t the only thing that feels on autopilot. It’s a bad sign when not a single character feels integral to your ensemble fantasy film. Then again, given the way the movie is constructed, you could just as easily remove title character Dumbledore from the equation and little would change. Series regular Tina Goldstein (Katherine Waterston) isn’t in this movie beyond a fleeting cameo despite co-leading the last two, and her reduced role doesn’t make one iota of difference (kudos to Waterston’s agent, by the way). The larger plot, about the rise of Wizard fascist Gellert Grindelwald (Mads Mikkelsen) and the woes of young Albus Dumbledore (Jude Law), has moved far beyond them, and barely requires their involvement in any legible way.
A year after the events of the first film, awkward Magi-zoologist Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne) is back, as is his stone-faced brother Theseus (Callum Turner) and his Muggle friend - excuse me, “No-Maj” friend - the delightful baker Jacob Kowalski (Dan Fogler), even though none of them really has any reason to be. The posters all minimize the “Fantastic Beasts” part of the title (in favor of the “Secrets of Dumbledore” subtitle), but since it continues to be a linear franchise, it doesn’t have the luxury of giving its main characters the boot. appears to have buyer’s remorse when it comes to this series. Where its predecessor, The Crimes of Grindelwald, was built around a messy anti-climax - characters chase each other helter-skelter for two hours, only to eventually stand around yelling plot twists - this one falls apart much sooner, to the point that it has to introduce a whole new magical conceit in order to justify how haphazard the whole thing truly is. It’s visually unimaginative, and there are few actual secrets of which to speak (one reveal from the last entry is mildly clarified, but that’s about it). There’s nothing fantastic about the new movie.
The Secrets of Dumbledore is the third film in the Fantastic Beasts series there are two more entries planned, but ending the Harry Potter spinoff here would be a mercy.
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