A mediocre film that is only salvaged by beautiful-production designs and a couple of strong performances. The biggest issue with this movie is that a whole lot of nothing is going on. It just feels like it’s spinning its wheels, and it becomes obvious that they’re not even building towards a big climax. Instead, they’re just setting up for the next few sequels. It doesn’t help that we’re on the journey with fairly-bland characters. It took most of the first “Fantastic Beasts” for me to warm up to them, but here they seem to have lost their chemistry. As far as the new characters, Johnny Depp only shows flashes of brilliance as the evil Grindelwald, while Jude Law has a strong, but reserved performance as the young Dumbledore. And while the creature and set designs are amazing, the CGI is too obvious most of the time.
** out of *****