What a letdown

Rating: 4/10 (18 November 2016)

It's a letdown. The fun and charming bits of Harry Potter were left out of this film. I like J.K. Rowling's work immensely, so that's hard to say.
Plot-wise, things are a mess. Newt and his luggage full of magical creatures are a side plot to the important things going on. The real story is that an auror in New York is searching for a powerful and dangerous magical force that manifests within a teenager. His plan: turn the destructive energy the teenager carries into a weapon, I assume. Enter Newt Scamander, who is trying to transport a thunderbird(?) to Arizona for release back into the wild. Some of Newt's other creatures escape in New York, and he has to round them up, all while becoming entangled with the auror and his teenage target.
The plot sounds sort of okay, but it's not well integrated. The characters don't add up to much of anything, either. The sidekick baker is fairly likable, though, along with his brewing romance with Queenie. Newt's a bit thin as a character. Eddie Redmayne's dialog also tended to come out mumbled, which made him hard to understand at times. Throw in a few acronyms and oddball words like MACUSA, and that makes for more confusion.
Altogether, the film needed more work to tighten the story lines and make Fantastic Beasts a story focused on Newt and his menagerie, instead of what we ended up with.