'Fantastic Beasts: Dumbledore's Secrets', JK Rowling's Expanded Universe Is Exhausting

In the first sequence of

, a new installment of JK Rowling's expanded universe, two characters sitting in a cafe talk and look at each other.

There is no visual brilliance or need for extraordinary special effects, as the rest of the grueling footage is supposed to.

Just two actors.

Performance and charisma.

Jude Law and Mads Mikkelsen.

Two faces and two voices that mutually extract the weight of the past.

Years ago they signed an atrocious pact: the conquest of the world.

Out of love, out of naivety, out of arrogance.

One of them is sorry.

The other perseveres in evil.

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They are the only five minutes in the film directed by David Yates in which there is something similar to emotion.

The rest are neat images that are stillborn because there is nothing behind them.

Conflicts of adult appearance between infantile fights.

was born as a response to an inevitable fact: the children reading Harry Potter were growing up.

So you had to keep feeding them, while continuing to feed the goose that lays the golden eggs that is the Hogwarts space (and its surroundings), either parallel or perpendicular, with other stories of a more youthful nature. than childish, protected by the tradition of British fantasy literature, with its own slang and its winks for fans that go from story to story.

The problem is that if the wand fights between children, and not by dint of imagination, were already difficult to film with a certain visual power, the fights between adults have something directly out of place.

With the Harry Potter movies, often refreshing in the first half of their stories and tiresome in the second, there were always moments when plot twists seemed to stem not so much from inventiveness as sheer whimsy.

In

, written by Rowling, although this time not alone, but with Steve Kloves, Hogwarts regular, more of the same happens.

The soap opera revelations, the love challenges and the allegedly political nuances are not enough to sustain a product that, in short, what it aims to do in the first place is to entertain without actually succeeding.

And the best example of those narrative cravings can be provided by seeing Mikkelsen with the same character that Colin Farrell played in the first installment of the series and Johnny Depp in the second.

Production issues, schedule and scandals, however, are solved by Rowling's idea that the evil Grindelwald has the ability to mutate.

Anything goes.

That the location, the position of the characters in the shot and even their objectives in the final climax of the film are so similar to the historical moment of

Would Be King — Kipling's lyrics, Huston's image — in which the rabble Daniel Dravot and Peachy Carnehan are going to be crowned kings of Kafiristan leads to an inevitable thought.

The lies and arrogance of the leading roles dominate in both sequences.

But one of them is born already dead, and the other will live forever.

Fantastic Beasts: Dumbledore's Secrets

Direction:

David Yachts.

Cast:

Eddie Redmayne, Jude Law, Mads Mikkelsen, Alison Sudol.

Genre:

fantastic.

United Kingdom, 2022.

Duration:

142 minutes.

Premiere: April 8.

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