Fun ride, but with some miscalculations.

Rating: 6/10 (23 January 2019)

The movie is very good if you disect it into the scenes themselves, but as a whole the puzzle doesn't offer a very engaging picture. Meaning, effects, dialogue, acting, etc. was absolutely fine, as you expect from a production on this level. And while the plot wasn't a mess, or terrible, or incoherent, it seamed unsure of what it wants to do. A huge chunk of the movie is our protagonist searching for beasts, but there is nothing interesting about it. We as viewers just stumble upon them again and again, everyone knows whats going to happen, but we have to wait a few minutes before the cycle repeats. At the end of the first half it causes the movie to drag, you're unsure what the story is going to be about, since youre 45-60mins in and there seems to be no significant plot. Later the story unravels and I thought to myself "oh, good. They DO know what their plot is." But once again we get interrupted by creature hunting and it completely wrecks the tension that JUST started building. I do like the creatures and understand why they wanted to sprinkle them inbetween, so that you don't just get people running around and talking. But the creature part shouldve been cut back, especially because the movie spans 130mins anyways. Little moments of creatures would have been enough, have them there as helping hands or weave them into the plot (as they sometimes did).
If they really wanted to show some longer scenes with creatures, a mini-series would've been a nice vehicel for that and I'm sure the HP-Fans would eat it up happily.
The movie still has enough going for it to be a quite enjoyable movie that the whole family can watch, especially some cute moments, just sad how a little tighter editing could have made it much better.