There are all kinds of dull movies. There’s check-your-watch (or phone) dull. There’s run-into-the-bathroom-to-splash-water-on-your-face dull. And then there’s “Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore,” which is standing-up dull.
For the record, standing-up dull is a special category, indicating a movie that is so boring that you have to watch some of it standing up, so as not to slip into some hard-to-reverse coma. With a movie this stultifying, the fear isn’t that you’ll fall asleep, but rather that you’ll never wake up.
The third in the “Fantastic Beasts” series is odd in that it’s a long movie with very little story, but lots of narrative commotion. Stuff happens, and then more stuff happens, and it’s all related but little of it has any forward motion.
At the heart of the picture, believe it or not, is the simple tale of an election. Who will become the next head wizard? Story-wise, that’s not much of anything, but everything else in the movie amounts to nothing.
Written by J.K. Rowling and Steve Kloves, it takes place in the same universe as the Harry Potter stories, and its sole appeal will be to people who just can’t get enough of that Wizarding World. Rowling and Kloves assume, perhaps rightly, that such people will make up their entire audience, so they don’t bother to explain much. They just throw you in, and you can either sink, swim or completely lose consciousness.
We begin with a conversation between Dumbledore (Jude Law) and the dark wizard Grindelwald (Mads Mikkelsen, taking over the role from Johnny Depp) at a restaurant, in which we find out that they used to be a couple. Hard to see any residual chemistry there, but it was years ago, probably in the springtime, and they were young. Incidentally, we also find out that Grindelwald is a maniac who wants to abuse and dominate non-magical people: “I’ll burn down their world.”
So, we start the film with a gratuitous gay reference, and we move on to a gratuitous Nazi reference. It’s the early 1930s now, and Grindelwald is based in Berlin. But wait, let’s think about this. Wasn’t thereanother fascist maniacrunning around that same city at that exact same time? Wouldn’t they have run into each other — maybe at the laundry, picking up their brown shirts? The connection between Grindelwald and Hitler is made so literal as to be ineffective and absurd.
The actors are fine, but they can only play the scenes. They can’t craft the story. For example, there is a whole longish sequence in which a witch named Lally (Jessica Williams) recruits Jacob Kowalski (Dan Fogler), the sweet but heartbroken non-magical baker from the last two “Fantastic Beasts” films, to join her crew. Their interaction is almost charming, but watching them you have a feeling, later confirmed, that very little of this will matter to the story.
Most of “Secrets of Dumbledore” consists of a series of relentlessly fey incidents, as when Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne) and his brother (Callum Turner) have to make their way out of a cave inhabited by dangerous scorpion-like creatures. To distract them, the two have to crouch and wiggle, with their arms up and their hands out. Needless to say, the Bangles did it better in their classic “Walk Like an Egyptian” music video.
The special effects are first-rate, especially if you want to see doughnuts and bagels multiply and attack people. (Have you been waiting for that? Search no more.) This is also the movie to see if you want to watch guys pointing twigs at each other, threateningly. Before the next installment, this series really needs to up its magic-wand game, because it’s making the characters look ridiculous.
K“Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore”:Fantasy. Starring Eddie Redmayne, Jude Law and Mads Mikkelsen. (PG-13. 142 minutes.) In theaters Friday, April 15.