Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore review — This beast is anything but fantastic

Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore

(12A) 142mins

★★☆☆☆

MUCH has changed in the world of this JK Rowling franchise since the second Fantastic Beasts offering four years ago.

There have been ferocious attempts to cancel the author over her comments about gender, Johnny Depp stepped away from his role as baddie Grindelwald and Covid put six months of delays on production.

The resulting threequel feels a little jaded.

A laborious stomp through Rowling’s magical world sees us catch up with dark wizard Gellert Grindelwald (now played by Mads Mikkelsen), who is gaining notoriety and making a bid for political power.

Albus Dumbledore (Jude Law) is desperate to ensure this doesn’t happen and puts together a gang to stop him.

As always, they include geeky naturalist Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne), his assistant Bunty (Victoria Yeates) and his brother Theseus (Callum Turner), muggle baker Jacob Kowalski (Dan Fogler) and multi-talented teacher Lally (Jessica Williams).

The motley crew split up and go on separate missions trying to outsmart the meanie.

But this makes the plot very muddy — and you feel you never quite know what on earth is going on.

It’s a surprisingly slow pace and there does not seem to be a central character either.

At times it feels like all roads lead back to Dumbledore or perhaps Scamander, but both start to appear like bystanders in this complex and chaotic storyline.

Redmayne’s one-note performance seems like he’s stuck in an audition to play a young Stephen Hawking. Mikkelsen, however, is hypnotic.

His high cheekbones and naturally pointed teeth make him look like he was made to play Dracula.

His eerie presence will make even superfans think “Johnny who?”.

There are some questionably long, drawn-out scenes that never seem to come to a conclusion — or have a place in the film at all.

One is a Matrix-esque fight sequence between Dumbledore and Grindelwald’s emo son Credence Bare­bone (Ezra Miller).

While the CGI is impressive, the time it takes to play out to zero conclusion is not.

Running at nearly two and a half hours, this beast is anything but fantastic.

The Outfit

(15) 105mins

★★★☆☆

CHICAGO, 1956, and Leonard Burling (Mark Rylance), a quiet, deferential Savile Row-trained tailor, runs a bespoke gentlemen’s outfitters with the help of his assistant Mable (Zoey Deutch).

But behind the cutting table and the swathes of fabric all is not as it seems.

The shop is a front for another “Outfit”, a group of mobsters who use it for shadier goings-on.

But someone is ratting on them to the FBI, and now Burling, known simply to the underworld as “English”, is about to be drawn deep into their bloodthirsty gangland activities.

This is the directorial debut of screenwriter ­Graham Moore – who won an Oscar for The Imitation Game in 2014.

But with the entire film kept within the confines of the shop’s three rooms, it’s hard not to shake the stagey feeling of watching a play being performed.

As Burling, Rylance offers up a masterclass in character study, and Simon Russell Beale as mob supremo Roy has huge presence. Other performances are less polished.

While the twists come thick and fast towards the end of the movie, the slow pace that precedes it – and the gentle, iambic narrator’s voice-over – does little to step up the tempo of this made-to-measure whodunnit.

Navalny

(12) 98mins

★★★★☆

IN August 2020, the Russian opposition leader, anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny fell ill on a flight to Moscow in what was later revealed to be an assassination attempt using Vladimir Putin’s favoured nerve agent Novichok.

Against the odds he survived the poisoning and this fly-on-the-wall documentary, directed by Daniel Roher, gives an astonishing account of how – despite denials from the Kremlin of any involvement – the truth was revealed.

First-person interviews with the engaging Navalny, his wife Yulia and teenage daughter Dasha, convey his fearlessness, opposing Putin in his home country and spreading the message that “people in power are corrupt thieves”.

Following the attempt on Navalny’s life, work by the investigations team Bellingcat uncovered the perpetrators.

And in a jaw-dropping moment, we witness a Russian Security Service agent – unaware of who he is speaking too – talk Navalny through the entire operation to murder him.

A special release of this gobsmacking film has been approved following the recent events in Ukraine and in the words of Navalny – currently imprisoned in ­Russia – “the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing”. Released April 12.