 It's a beautiful day out in Minnesota, probably one of the last we're going to get before the snow really starts to come down and the weather has dropped to the negatives. So I thought I'd come out onto the beach in this no-access area, no trespassing if you will, and talk about Harry Potter's spin-off flick, Fantastic Beasts and where to find them. I can tell you this right now, you're not finding them at the theater. I've been an aggressive way to start things out. This is, it's not a bad movie, I'm going to get that out of the way right away. Is it a great movie? I don't think so. Not at all. Is it my favorite Harry Potter movie? No, it's my least favorite, but quite a long shot. Full disclosure, I'm a big Harry Potter fan, even the ones that I don't think are that great are still great compared to a lot of other movies. I love the aesthetic, I love the music, I love the look of everything, the magic, the whimsy, the characters, I mean the characters, forget about it. So when they announced this new spin-off, J.K. Rollins was back in the mix, writing away, I thought what could go wrong? Nothing really goes wrong, it just doesn't go that right either. First off, the music is nowhere to be found. Where is the memorable Hedwig's theme? Where are some of these other scores that just really bring the world alive? There's hardly any of that. Hedwig's theme is maybe uttered once in this flick, and it's very kind of low-key. You don't really notice it. And I couldn't think of another standout song for the life of me. The film is shot very nicely, I think David Yates, highly underrated director, or at least that's what I thought. He did the last four Harry Potter movies, he's doing all these fantastic beast ones. But after seeing this, maybe I was wrong, maybe he doesn't have as much life and energy as is required in the Harry Potter movies. I think the later ones worked with his benefit because they were such somber dark affairs. But we're starting over again, so we need to rejuvenate the franchise. Get people once again pumped up for more installments. This doesn't really achieve that. Instead, we have a lot of lackluster characters. Newt Scranton, I can't remember the guy, Eddie Reddon, read something, I don't know. The guy from Theory of Everything, he's great in that, he's awful in Jupiter Ascending. And here he's just kind of, he's just there, that's what most of this movie is. It's just there. You've seen all the magic before, done much better. Yeah, they're moving some plates around to set a dinner table. I don't give a shit. They did that in the Hobbit movies. I don't care, I don't need to see that. There's some, I'm just waiting to get mugged out here on the beach. That'll be a perfect end cap to this day. Characters are just not exciting. The blonde cute number, the sister, she's the most energetic and exciting of the bunch. The heavier set guy, he's pretty fun as well. But nobody, like I don't remember the names besides Newt. Colin Farrell's character, can't tell you his name either. That's also due to me just being terrible with memorizing names. He is the highlight by far for me. I think Colin Farrell as an actor is hugely underrated. Much like Yates as a director, or at least that's what I thought until I saw this. Effects, we expected this point to be very good. They are, but that doesn't appeal to me. Maybe when Doctor Strange just came out a week or two before. And that affects up the ass. I need more than that. I needed a gripping story. And here's where the movie really suffers. Now the pacing is terrible. It starts out slow, it stays slow for a good 45 minutes. We're building up this new situation. But the problem is, it's not only pacing, it's tone. Some of the tone is light-hearted and fun and playful, but then you have this really dark subset with the whole witch coven, the Salem witch trial thing. There's this group, this family, that's just got a lot of disturbing shit in play. We're talking child beatings and stuff. Yeah, the other Harry Potter movies gradually get darker, but the first two or three are pretty playful and light-hearted. Even when there is darker stuff going on in the background, it's told and visually shown in such a way that's not so threatening and scary. Whereas this one is just kind of, it's very adult. So to go from a scene where a mother makes the son take off his belt for a good whooping, then you go to a scene in the park with Newt Scranton dry humping the air to get a rhino thing back in his briefcase. You see the disconnect? Am I excited for future installments? I guess. I'm not. I'm indifferent. That's how I am with this movie. I am indifferent. It is in the Harry Potter universe though, so that automatically bumps it up for me quite a bit. It is nice being back, regardless of how kind of lifeless the characters are. I think there are some really exciting things in it. I'm not going to do spoilers, I decided we'll just stay away from that. But I think there are definitely things they need to improve on and I don't think they should title the next one Fantastic Beasts at all. It should be called something completely different for a sequel. I think they've tapped into the Fantastic Beasts enough. There's one cute little one that steals a lot of stuff. That's its trade. He's like a platypus thing. By far the highlight for me as far as the animals go. I don't know. I don't have a whole lot. I'm rambling on, but if I'm to grade this or rate this, as I always do, out of a ten point scale, I'm going to go 6.5. That might be lower than some of the other outlets out there, but I hold Harry Potter in very high esteem. So when one of them lets me down, it lets me down. You may enjoy more if you did. Please share in the comments. Thanks for watching. I'm going to go walk down the beach now on a very picturesque ending.