Fantastic Beasts and where to find them

[zico]

4/10.

A better title for this film would be "Fantastic Marketing Opportunities and where to find them". It's a pretty shameless (though profitable) operation to export the Harry Potter phenomenon to the good old USA, with US wizard schools and a wizard-run FBI.

It's set in New York in the 1920's, and the sets and atmosphere are pretty good. It surely can't be much of a spoiler to reveal that in this film there are a lot of fantastic beasts that need to be found. The plot is pretty thin, there are goodies, baddies and quite a lot of special effects, but a lot of time is wasted on sequences of plates and glasses levitating, reverse-time sequences where they run the film backwards for a little while, and people chasing fantastic beasts for too long (some of the beasts really aren't that fantastic, particularly a Fantastic Mole which nicks coins and jewels).

Eddie Redmayne is the lead, who is doing a kind of quirky Dr.Who impression in this. Colin Farrell is also in it a bit, and is quite good.

If people loved Harry Potter, they'll probably be just about content with this. For me it was about 30 minutes too long and I didn't really care about any of the characters. I really liked the Harry Potter films, but this just feels like a marketing exercise with not much creativity going on.