'Fantastic Beasts 2' Doesn't Deliver On The Magic Of The First

★★★1/2

There’s a lot going on in The Crimes Of Grindelwald.

Johnny Depp’s titular villain is on the march, escaping from indefinite detention on a dark-and-stormy night, in a prison-break from a dragon-drawn carriage in the skies. Eddie Redmayne’s Newt Scamander is on the case, suitcase full of magical critters - weird, wonderful, and totally adorbz. Young Dumbledore turns out to be Jude Law, teaching the kids about boggarts in both present and past, resplendent in greying beard and three-piece suit. Back in his own schoolboy days, turns out Dumbledore and Grindelwald were thick as thieves; blood brothers who perhaps shared other bodily fluids.

Ezra Miller broods, a young colt pacing, then exploding in righteous, building-wrecking fury, magical powers wild and uncontrolled. Claudia Kim is on his arm, in bodice and retro frock, occasionally turning into a giant serpent, a curse she can’t escape. Katherine Waterson’s bob is still sharp enough to cut bread with, and so is her scepticism. Alison Sudol keeps doing her Marilyn Monroe-voiced thing, Dan Fogler is comic relief with a romantic heart, Poppy Corby-Tuech is a glowering villainess ruthlessly dispatching luckless muggles, and Brontis Jodorowsky plays a 600-year-old alchemist and deep Harry Potter reference.

There are plots, schemes, undercover Polyjuice stings on the French ministry of magic, great revelations about true identities, CGI things whooshing this way and that, a tenement house that explodes outwards then hangs in scattered fragments in the air, plenty of dramatic wand-clutching, some great outfits, a showdown in a spooky graveyard, a giant magical-energy demon of pulsing blue flame battling waves of orange fire in what felt to me like a why-so-serious Scott Pilgrim redux, a final-fight so noisy it rivals a plane taking off, wormlike parasites pulled from eyeballs, dastardly deaths, plenty of great fascist symbolism, race parable and perennial social commentary, a magical family-tree that’s an incisive indictment of patriarchal lineage, an old-timey circus filled with magical creatures that gets packed up into a neat little suitcase by a blithe house-elf, a giant Chinese dragon with a trailing red tail that flutters like a ribbon, a seaweed sea-dragon just waiting for Redmayne to ride it real good, and all manner of flashbacks, to past tragedies and Hogwarts days; most notably with Zoë Kravitz’s Leta Lestrange, who, as The Crimes Of Grindelwald progresses, becomes critical to the whole story, the tragic character at its centre.

It’s not that there’s too much happening, exactly. All these sights and sounds are pleasing unto themselves, and come meted out over 134 minutes; director David Yates — now making his sixth Potterverse picture — showing a great command of pace and delivery, managing to keep things moving along briskly whilst never feeling chaotic or cluttered.

In turn, there’s much to admire in the complexity of the world JK Rowling is penning, here, in the Fantastic Beasts series; and how her writing is deepening the mythos of her Wizarding World, drawing connections to the original Harry Potter series yet making this subsequent series just as complex.

But, as The Crimes Of Grindelwald broadens the scope of this series — spiralling out from Redmayne’s beast-loving oddball; sadly delivering us less fantastic beasts, more magical politicking — to take in an ensemble, and set into motion various plot-movements, the second film feels all too much like a second film. Or, perhaps, more accurately, a second episode. For all of the stuff that happens, here, nothing is really resolved, or feels self-contained. The chess pieces move around, greater developments are hinted at, and the groundwork is laid out for future films.

In the face of such, it’s hard to shake the feeling that you’re watching an instalment, not a singular work; the final feeling, on filing out of the cinema, strangely incomplete. Perhaps, in the age of the movie-going ‘universe’, this is an old-fashioned complaint; and, years down the line, when this flick’s being seen in the middle of a Potter marathon or someone’s own at-home binge-watch, such complaints will be meaningless. But, the next Fantastic Beasts film won’t arrive for two years. So, The Crimes Of Grindelwald, as piece of event-cinema, needs to stand on its own. And, for all its wizarding and wonder and whimsy and dastardly Depp-ism, that’s something it never quite does.