Underwhelmed

Rating: 5/10 (24 November 2016)

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them suffers from a lack of story development and relies all too heavily on an overabundance of special effects. We spend an inordinate amount of time following our main characters chasing CGI creatures around and looking more like a Pokemon game than actually delivering anything that's terribly interesting as far as story development goes. The film looks great and the performances are solid but it is so lacking in the aforementioned that I found it increasingly tedious as the film dragged on. If you're dazzled by movies heavy on creatures and effects and don't care if its a bit light on story, you'll probably love this. But if you're looking for something that's going to deliver a compelling story that decides to get interesting some time before three-quarters of the way through the movie's two-hour running time, then you'll really need to look elsewhere. I give this five out of ten not because it's utterly terrible, it isn't, but it's just not interesting enough and I don't think it warrants the high scores people are giving it. There are far better films that rate that high.