'Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them' is more fine than fantastic

The thing fans need to remember about Harry Potter movies is that they were never superhero films.

Sure, there was your standard Marvel/DC good-versus-evil, battle-for-the-soul-of-the-planet-type stuff, but the real magic of Potter was the growing-up tale central to the narrative. Whatever larger-than-life fantasy stuff was going on around Harry, Ron and Hermione, the story was grounded in very real teenagers coping with very real problems in a very real-seeming, amazingly fleshed out magical world.

Take away the growing-up aspect, and sub in a charmless NYC set for the magic of Hogwarts, and fans are left with just another superhero tale that Hollywood is cranking out year round. Adding a few magical creatures unfortunately doesn't differentiate Fantastic Beasts from standard blockbuster fare. Your eagerness to sample another version of the same story will directly correlate to how much enjoyment you gain from checking out the Potter-verse spinoff Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, which features a script by J. K. Rowling herself.

Fantastic Beasts, the first in five (!) planned installments, tells the tale of Newt Scamander (a purposely awkward and not-so-purposely difficult to understand Eddie Redmayne) a British Magizoologist who comes to NYC in 1926 with a magical suitcase full of animals. While passing through, he runs into a No-Maj (American for muggle, or non-magic person), winds up accidentally switching suitcases with him and subsequently a few of Newt's magical creatures escape.

I'm not kidding when I note that a majority of the next hour of the film is various scenes where Newt and the No-Maj Jacob (Dan Fogler) attempt to get the various animals back in the suitcase. The CGI for the creatures (particularly the adorable Niffler) is well done and fun to look at, but it's disappointingly repetitive. There's not much world-building going on here.

Compounding this issue are wild tone shifts throughout that seem to suggest at one point this was two very different movies. All the many scenes with the CGI animals point to a fun romp that will particularly appeal to children; the highlight being a mesmerizing moment when Newt takes Jacob into his magical suitcase for the first time, showcasing a world of various creatures and habitats and harkening back to Potter standout scenes like Harry's ride on a Hippogiff in Prisoner of Azkaban. Ok, I thought, this isn't the same tone as Potter, but I could get on board with a fun lighthearted family movie.

But interspersed throughout this breezy first hour are a few incredibly heavy scenes featuring a scary religious leader and a few abused children, including Credence (Ezra Miller) who has a mysterious dark secret that a magical, power-hungry Auror Percival Graves (Colin Farrell) seems to be helping him with. This subplot becomes the focus of the dark last bit of the film, and appears likely to be the center and tone of the rest of the franchise going forward.

These two fairly different plots might be excusable — after all, Harry Potter and Co. traveled from the Yule ball to fighting dragons — but here, it's difficult to suss out what is and isn't important and how and when things thread together.

Why on Earth did we spend an hour hunting animals when there are still so many unanswered questions about Credence? The fact that thus far a majority of the characters, particularly women Tina (Katherine Waterston) and Queenie (Alison Sudol), are disappointingly one-note doesn't help matters. There is unfortunately no one here that holds a candle to Rowling's best creations.

To be fair, the film pulls off a truly thrilling surprise in the final moments, one that suggests future installments could be fairly exciting. As a standalone movie, however, it can't quite figure out what it wants to be. For many superhero fans, hitting the beats of the battles and intrigue may be enough for a moderately fun night out. For Potter fans who are used to expecting a little more depth with their thrills, Fantastic Beasts could have used a bit more magic.