'Fantastic Beasts 2' Early Reviews Point To A "Confusing Jumble" That Will Make "Fans Weep In Frustration"

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One of fall’s biggest films is only a week away, and while there are plenty of Potterheads out there surely excited, it appears that “Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald” is perhaps a film better left unseen.

The second film in the ‘Fantastic Beasts’ series, and the tenth in the entire ‘Harry Potter’ franchise, ‘Crimes of Grindelwald’ brings fans back to the world of Newt Scamander and the characters you know and love from the first film, while also adding Jude Law and Johnny Depp. And sadly, as it appears from the crop of early reviews, the film suffers from having just too much going on.

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Angie Han from Mashable tweeted, “I regret to inform you that the new ‘Harry Potter’ is terrible. She continued, “If I didn’t have to watch these movies for work this would be the point at which I quit the franchise and just Wikipedia the rest to see how it ends.” Ouch.

The sentiment was echoed by Mike Ryan from UPROXX, who tweeted, “I’ve seen every ‘Harry Potter’ movie. I liked this first FANTASTIC BEASTS. But with CRIMES OF GRINDELWALD, there are just so many characters I don’t care about, I just felt lost the whole movie. In a, ‘I have no idea what’s happening and I don’t think I care,’ way.”

But Wizarding World fans might just write those opinions off as just short social media reviews, attempting to stoke debate and gain notoriety. So, to further illustrate the issues of the film, let’s take a look at a selection of other respected critics from major outlets and see what they had to say about the latest film from the mind of writer J.K. Rowling.

“There’s a moment near the end of Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald when I realized the scene I was watching could have been the second one in the movie. Instead, it was near the end, climactic and important. Yet it took so long to get here and everything that happened prior was so superfluous to the events unfolding, it dawned on me that the latest film in J.K. Rowling’s Wizarding World simply wasn’t up to par.” (Germain Lussier from iO9’s review)

“It’s full of exciting new characters, revelations and storylines, but the only way you could possibly keep them all in the air at the same time would be to use a Wingardium Leviosa spell. And spoiler alert: Those don’t actually exist.” (William Bibbiani from The Wrap)

“The noisiest, most rhythmless, and least coherent entry in the Wizarding World saga since Alfonso Cuarón first gave the franchise its sea legs in 2004, ‘Grindelwald’ feels less like ‘The Hobbit’ than a trawl through the appendixes of ‘The Silmarillion’ — a confusing jumble of new characters and eye-crossing marginalia.” (Andrew Barker from Variety)

“An excruciating bore just barely enlivened by stray glimpses of Hogwarts, a flicker of gay romance and a menagerie of computer-generated creepy-crawlies, ‘Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald’ is enough to make J.K. Rowling fans weep in frustration, provided they can even keep their eyes open.” (Justin Chang from the LA Times)

“It’s less a necessary new chapter in this ongoing story than the movie-shaped equivalent of memorabilia, or maybe just an affordable multiplex alternative to whisking the whole family off to the Wizarding World area of Universal Studios.” (A.A. Dowd from the AV Club)

But it wasn’t all terrible reviews. There was some faint praise among the critics:

“But ‘Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald,’ the second in the projected five-movie franchise written by J.K. Rowling, displays enough of the author’s magical formula and Dickensian narrative power to make this sequel a huge step up from the middling ‘Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.’” (Caryn James from THR)

“With so different narrative strands, the storytelling risks becoming tangled. Even so, ‘The Crimes of Grindelwald’ is rich and intriguing fare that will leave viewers impatient for the next sequel (if only so they can make more sense of what has been going on here.)” (Geoffrey Macnab from the Independent)

Audiences will be able to judge for themselves when “Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald” hits theaters on November 16.