Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore – Film Review

Professor Albus Dumbledore (Jude Law) knows the powerful, dark wizard Gellert Grindelwald (Mads Mikkelsen) is moving to seize control of the wizarding world. Unable to stop him alone, he entrusts magizoologist Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne) to lead an intrepid team of wizards and witches. They soon encounter an array of old and new beasts as they clash with Grindelwald’s growing legion of followers.

Ah, it feels nice to be back in the Wizarding World once again. It’s been four long years since the release of the previous Fantastic Beasts film, The Crimes of Grindelwald, aka the worst film in the entire franchise. It essentially just felt like a set-up movie for this film, The Secrets of Dumbledore. Grindelwald was such a tragically boring film with nothing going on to the point where it was legitimately disheartening. No movie about wizards and witches should be boring like that.

And despite how treacherous the path to The Secrets of Dumbledore has been, I still maintained my excitement, hoping that the filmmakers would deliver a movie that would at least be as good as the first Fantastic Beasts – a movie that I greatly adore. I am beyond thrilled to report that The Secrets of Dumbledore is without a doubt the best entry in this spinoff series, far surpassing even the first one.

It actually felt like the filmmakers took the story seriously this time around, which was such a relief. Grindelwald felt like the writers were giving up, injecting a couple of scenes involving magic in the film in order for it to fit within the Wizarding World, but Dumbledore feels like the writers actually care about the franchise again. This is quite a lengthy movie (nearly two and a half hours) and yet I found myself totally captivated for the entire running time.

Just when I thought the film couldn’t get any more interesting, it did, and it continued to grow all the way to the end. Of course, not everything here lands. The ending – while absolutely amazing – does leave things on a strange note. Is there going to be a fourth movie or not? We don’t really know. And some questions that get raised early on don’t get resolved by the time the film comes to a close, making you wonder about certain things.

Ever since seeing him in the first film, I’ve loved seeing Eddie Redmayne portray the series’ lead Newt Scamander, a loving man with a big heart and a huge passion for animals and other fantastic beasts. His character got less interesting in the second film, but gratefully, he’s wonderful yet again in this one. Redmayne delivers a truly heartwarming performance here and he fits inside the Wizarding World so perfectly.

Mads Mikkelsen replaced Johnny Depp in this film in the role of Grindelwald, and while I did miss Depp’s presence, I have to admit that I found Mikkelsen to be a much better fit for the villainous role. Mikkelsen is able to bring such intensity to the character that Depp simply lacked. Whenever I saw Grindelwald do something in this film, it was genuinely intimidating. Just looking into Mikkelsen’s eyes was enough to freak me out just a little bit.

If you’re a massive fan of the Wizarding World like my girlfriend and I are, then you’re more than likely going to be enamored with Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore, which feels like a gigantic breath of fresh air and a welcomed course correction for the series.