142 min | PG-13 | April 15, 2022 | Warner Bros. Pictures
Dumbledore cannot fight Grindelwald directly. A blood pact made in their youth binds his hands, so he sends Newt Scamander and a small team to stop Grindelwald from seizing power through an election. Three films in, the saga still cannot explain why any of this matters.
The third Fantastic Beasts film abandons most of the creatures that gave the series its name. Gellert Grindelwald is mounting a campaign to lead the wizarding world and purge it of Muggles. Albus Dumbledore cannot move against him directly because a blood pact made in their youth binds them. So Dumbledore recruits Newt Scamander and a small team to confound Grindelwald’s plans through misdirection. The film is less a story than a delivery system for franchise mythology. It spends its energy explaining a war the audience has been promised for two films.
Eddie Redmayne plays Newt Scamander with the same hunched diffidence he brought to the earlier films. He mumbles, avoids eye contact, and conveys more feeling toward his creatures than toward any person. Jude Law plays Dumbledore with quiet melancholy and gives the film its only emotional weight. Mads Mikkelsen takes over Grindelwald and plays him as a cold tactician rather than a showman. He underplays where the role wants menace, and the choice drains the villain of urgency. Dan Fogler keeps Jacob Kowalski warm and human, and the baker remains the most likable presence in the cast.
David Yates directs his sixth film in this world. He stages the European settings with confidence, and the recreation of a wizarding election inside a fascist-tinged 1930s Berlin gives the production design a genuine subject. The script by J.K. Rowling and Steve Kloves untangles the convolution of the previous entry and replaces it with thinness. The editing keeps the team’s parallel missions moving, then stalls each time the film pauses to explain the blood pact. The score swells dutifully under scenes that have not earned the feeling, and the spectacle arrives on schedule without ever surprising.
This is a franchise that has lost track of its own appeal. The beasts are a footnote. The politics are a backdrop. The real engine is a love story between two wizards that the films keep gesturing toward and refusing to dramatize. The Secrets of Dumbledore is more coherent than the film before it and less alive than the films before that. It moves competently from one set piece to the next and leaves nothing behind.