Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find a Compelling Plot?

Rating: 6/10 (3 December 2016)

A charitable rating because I like the beasts very much (albeit it'd be nice if this was the era of Jim Henson's Creature Shop instead of ALL CGI), and I even didn't actively dislike Eddie Redmayne here like in his performances last year (though he still has certain little tics and a wide-eyed profile that's not enormously likable). Basically anything to do with Newt Scamander's adventures along with Jacob the would-be baker (a funny if one and a half note Dan Fogler) and Kathleen Waterson is a fun time, and there's an element of Doctor Who I appreciated as far as a character going off into some new place with his police box (err, suitcase here), facing off with some gnarly creatures, and humans who are a variety of helpful and disastrous.
But when it gets into the actual *plot* it becomes trickier to handle for Rowling as a (first-time?) screenwriter: there's darkness here that sometimes, not all the time, gets to be too dark, at least for what is being set up as a "franchise" or whatever. In the Potter films there was a more gradual build up to darker themes and tones and scenes and kills. Here, it's just there, and despite finding Samantha Morton to be terrifying in a convincing way as the head of an anti-witch cult, and despite finding Colin Farrel to be sturdy as a villain, I didn't much care for the conflicts around the uh, Obscurus-what-have-you (sorry if I'm not good with names, it's a late-night review), and ultimately it's a lack of heart that makes me not care as much. To put it into perspective, I found more to engage in emotionally with Fogler than Redmayne, by a mile, and only hints (but not enough) with Waterson's backstory.
What makes me want to give it an even lower rating is that the final act turns into what so many Hollywood movies from these studios out to be Legacyquel-McFranchise-villes is that it has to be some massive threat tearing ass through the city and the (super)heroes have to face off to stop it. There's actually one interesting facet to this that kinda-sorta is happening, where it's compassion or even something close to empathy, that Newt uses against the villainous force, however this gets put on the wayside for more action and special effects that are surface-cool but deep down empty and it all leads up to a reveal for an actor to come that made me throw out my hands like "WHY!?!" There's derivative things to this movie that Rowling may have made intentional or not; aside from Doctor Who, I also thought of Men in Black with it featuring a Magic-Police-Special-Agency force, and X-Men in large part with Farrel's character (tell me you don't see Magneto there, especially near the end).
I found a lot of creativity and some clever things to this - hell, a platypus obsessed with thievery is a highlight of any movie this *year* let alone this one - and just the idea that this is a hero not unlike a, uh, Charles Darwin but with magic. I went in with a lot of goodwill towards this, but didn't leave as satisfied as I had hoped given this writer and the world to work in. It's the sort of blockbuster that would have me, then lose me, have me then lose me, and so on (i.e. on one hand Ron Perlman cameo, and you'll know it when you see it; on the other hand... Ezra Miller).