Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald is a flawed movie and a horrible addition to the Harry Potter Universe. There were high expectations with this considering the franchise that this film is associated with, but it falls short on many levels. This film nearly made me lose faith in J.K Rowling and the Harry Potter Franchise as a whole.

In The Crimes of Grindelwald, Albus Dumbledore (Jude Law) enlists former student Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne) in an effort to thwart Gellert Grindelwald’s (Johnny Depp) plan of raising pure-blood wizards to rule over all non-magical beings.

The biggest flaw seems to be that there was no structure to the film. A huge chunk of the movie is wasted solely on re-introducing old characters from the last Fantastic Beasts movie. There’s barely any buildup to the climax. To the film’s credit though, the climax is the best part of the movie because it really gets the audience on the edge of their seats, however it is a long journey to get to that point. It is so unstructured and very hard to follow up until the last few minutes.

The movie also has little to nothing to do with the actual crimes of Grindelwald. In the beginning, we see Grindelwald break out of prison and kill a few people, and that’s it. The movie seems way more focused on Credence and the Lestrange Family.

Everyone except for Grindelwald, seem to have no agency throughout the movie. It appears that things just happen to them through pure coincidence, even though in the film they’re supposedly in charge of their own future.  

Then, of course, the final nail in the coffin happened at the end of the movie -major spoiler alert- when it was revealed that there was another Dumbledore sibling, and it was Credence, or Aurelius Dumbledore. It came completely out of nowhere.

Fantastic Beasts: Crimes of Grindelwald was not only an unnecessary addition to the Potter Universe, but it is so bad that it drags the entire franchise down with it. This film serves as an example of J.K Rowling desperately clinging onto the Potter franchise when it should have ended after Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.