'Fantastic Beasts...' review: The magic has disappeared

Something terrible has happened to J.K. Rowling’s latest “Harry Potter” spinoff, “Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore.” The main culprits are worn-out writing, sluggish pacing and muddy cinematography, but there’s another force that killed the magic here: politics.

It swirls mostly outside the film but also seeps into it thanks to Rowling’s controversial statements about sexual identity. Her sudden revelation about Hogwarts headmaster Albus Dumbledore — he's gay! — met with a combination of praise and skepticism, but the public mood changed when she began expressing traditional notions of gender and biological sex. Those opinions pulled Rowling into the culture wars, drawing fire from the trans community and wounding fans who saw “Harry Potter” as a fable of acceptance and inclusion.

Now, a series that should have been Rowling’s second triumph has become a muddled, uncertain mess. You can almost hear Rowling and co-writer Steve Kloves — along with director David Yates and probably every executive at Warner Bros. — wondering aloud: What can we say, and how should we say it? Can we be topical without being inflammatory? How can we please all the people, all the time?

The result is a movie unlikely to please anyone, even just on a storytelling level. For starters, our hero, the lovable “magizoologist” Newt Scamander (a still-endearing Eddie Redmayne), must share screen time with a whole slew of less-than-interesting helpmates, such as his frumpy assistant Bunty (Victoria Yeates), the condescending Charms professor Lallie (Jessica Williams) and a glowering nonentity named Yusuf Kama (William Nadylam). That leaves little room for the film’s two most vibrant characters, the warmhearted baker Jacob Kowalski (Dan Folger) and his mind-reading love-interest, Queenie Goldstein (Alison Sudol).

They all assemble against the evil wizard Gellert Grindelwald (Mads Mikkelsen, stepping in for Johnny Depp, who relinquished the role following accusations of abuse from his ex-wife). Grindelwald, now a populist politician, is surrounded by -talk of rioting voters and conspiracy theories, but in the end the movie retreats to the familiar "Potter" trope of Nazi imagery. Weirdly, words of support for Rowling (“All ideas deserve to be heard, even those we find disagreeable") are spoken by a spineless collaborator named Vogel (Oliver Masucci).

All that aside, “The Secrets of Dumbledore” has trouble simply making its storylines pay off. The youthful romance between Grindelwald and Dumbledore (a charismatic Jude Law), is less closeted than before, but still doesn’t fully convince. As for the woeful figure of Credence (Ezra Miller, whose recent arrest for disorderly conduct has further dinged this movie's publicity campaign), he's ill-treated by everyone, including his creators.

All franchises hit bumps in the road, and it’s possible that “Fantastic Beasts” will pull itself out of this ditch. A combination of lackluster material and dwindling goodwill for its author, however, makes that difficult to imagine. For now, the magic in Rowling’s world is gone.

By Rafer Guzmán

rafer.guzman@newsday.com