Not fantastic, but still pretty good

I was never a huge fan of the Harry Potter films; they always struck me as being made for the huge constituency of Potter fans who wanted to see every aspect of J.K. Rowling’s world faithfully captured on the screen. There’s a lot of pointless spectacle; the quidditch matches, for example, have no narrative purpose but the fans want to see them so in they go. In that sense the Potter films are not adaptations so much as documents.

As a prequel of sorts Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them starts with a blank-ish slate. Harry Potter’s world exists but it is on the other side of the Atlantic and – since this is set in New York in the Twenties – it is some 80 years in the future. The result is a film that, for the most part, is a very satisfying extension of the world into which Harry will be born. Production designer Stuart Craig has a wonderful time with a steampunk vision of Manhattan and it sets the mood expertly.

This time round our hero is Eddie Redmayne’s Newt Scamander who has come to New York at the end of his journey as a sort of sorcerous David Attenborough collecting specimens all over the world. He has a case full of the aforementioned creatures which are banned in New York. When he accidentally swaps cases with Jacob Kowalski (Dan Fogler), the creatures escape and chaos ensues.

Newt has to recapture them as well as encountering the realities of his new environment. This is the magical equivalent of Prohibition era New York. The magical community has gone underground and is under threat; not only from a mysterious invisible presence that seems to be tearing up the city but also Grindelward, a missing dark wizard who may be heading to Manhattan. The Magical Congress of the United States has its work cut out and they could do without Newt’s interference.

There is much to enjoy about Fantastic Beasts. It is genuinely exciting and thrilling, as well as being quite charming in places; it will have to appeal to children as well as adults. Generally it’s well conceived and the running time of a shade over two hours makes it relatively pacy.

Where the film fell down for me was in a script that tries to cram in too much plot without giving us any character. One of my issues with J.K. Rowling in the Potter books is the amount of overwriting involved, even if she is creating a world out of nothing where everything has to be explained. Even her Robert Galbraith books – which I enjoy immensely – seem a little wordy.

In this film however there is an absence of detail. We know what all the characters do, but we don’t know who they are. Newt’s academic diffidence is overdone to the point where almost every line is delivered looking at his shoes, or at the floor, or generally avoiding eye contact. This gets wearisome after a while; it’s a collection of characteristics rather than character.

There are also rather too many fantastic creatures. They come at you with dizzying frequency which not only stretches the CGI to the limit but also, I think, diminishes the sense of wonder. We never quite get the chance to appreciate them before the next one comes along.

The plot doesn’t hide its secrets very well either. There are no great surprises when the villains are unmasked and there’s a general lack of imagination in the main story. The sub-plots on the other hand are generally much more satisfying and the story of Jacob and Queenie (Alison Sudol) is the best thing about the film.

In David Yates, who did four Potter films, the franchise is launched in a safe pair of hands. However, as John Glen was with the Bond pictures, there is a tendency to be effectively a ‘house director’ and sacrifice imagination for efficiency. It’s no coincidence I think that the best of the original franchise Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban was the one directed by the only film maker heavily invested in magical realism.

On the whole there is a lot of hope for the future. But given that we are allegedly to have another four Scamander movies it would be nice if the franchise felt confident enough to take a few risks. The revival of the Bond movies came when they started thinking out of the box in terms of directors and it would be interesting if Harry Potter’s custodians took a punt on a director of vision and flair for the next one.

The figures don't add up for The Accountant

Anna Kendrick (l) and Ben Affleck (r)

Although he doesn't get the attention he deserves these days Paddy Chayefsky was a great screenwriter with three Oscars to prove it. But the man behind Network, The Hospital, Marty and so many others is a star in my book for identifying and naming the ‘rubber ducky’ moment.

This started as a private joke between Chayefsky and his good friend, the equally award-laden director, Sidney Lumet. They noted that oftentimes in bad movies there would be a lull in the action while a key character explained his back story. This was the point where the villain explained he was the way he was, and that he had strangled all those kittens, because his mother took away his rubber ducky when he was three.

While identifying the rubber ducky moment was a source of some amusement for Lumet and Chayefsky, you could spend a long time watching their films and trying to find one without success. Not so with The Accountant.

The whole third act of this Ben Affleck thriller is one long rubber ducky moment thanks to J.K. Simmons – and trust me I am spoiling nothing by revealing this. In common with most rubber ducky speeches, it is long and heartfelt, in short, an actor’s gift – but entirely redundant. We shouldn’t need to be told the back story; it should be obvious from the actions and behaviour of the character. Not so in this picture.

It’s a shame because up till this point The Accountant had been a slow-moving but just about engaging thriller in which Affleck plays Christian Woolf, a man on the autistic spectrum who happens to be a whizz with figures. He is also deadly with a Bushmaster assault rifle; think Rain Man meets American Sniper.

Affleck has been living a double life. A childhood trauma sent him round the world to learn a series of skills from assorted experts; then he remembered he wasn’t Batman in this picture so he chose accountancy instead of crime-fighting. His autistic savant nature enabled him to forensically assess the accounts of some of the world’s dodgiest criminals so they could work out who was stealing from them. One assumes that, rather than carry their possessions out in a bin bag, the unfortunates that Affleck identified were themselves carried out in bin bags, but this moral consequence appears not to have occurred to anyone. Nonetheless when someone appears to be stealing from software tycoon John Lithgow he hires Affleck to do his thing.

Simmons meanwhile is the US Treasury official searching for this mysterious underworld accountant to the point where he pressures a young agent to find him or face having her guilty past revealed. Anna Kendrick is the young whistle-blower in Lithgow’s firm who is working with Affleck to reveal the thief.

There is also a mysterious thug played by Jon Bernthal who, despite his macho appearance, is a living, breathing rubber ducky all on his own.

The problem with The Accountant for me is that the story simply doesn’t hang together. There are four separate plots here which run in parallel and only come together because of the contrivance of Simmons’ rubber ducky speech. The final third of the film is completely at odds with the rest of the picture as it limps along to a fairly obvious conclusion.

An additional problem is Affleck's lack of charisma. I appreciate that this is a character trait here but it is very difficult for the audience to engage with a character whose raison d'etre is his insularity from the world. It is difficult to empathise with Affleck and therefore difficult to care what happens.

Director Gavin O’Connor takes a workmanlike approach but in those moments when the bullets stop flying you realise there is nothing to support the plot other than a bunch of recognisable but generally underused names. In short, it doesn’t really add up.

The girl on the slow train to nowhere

Justin Theroux and Emily Blunt

Given that the book on which this film is based was in the best-seller charts this time last year there is a definite take the money and run feel to the film version. In narrative terms it is full of plot holes, in emotional terms it’s as deep as a puddle; in script terms it could do with a rewrite or two. In short, it feels rushed, like a film cashing in on a hot book.

Full disclosure. I didn’t care for the book. I thought it was one-dimensional and none of the characters was clearly defined to the point where I frequently couldn’t tell which was which. They are not individuated and they all have the same voice.

Most of these faults, plus a few more, are carried into the film which is essentially the story of three women; Rachel (Emily Blunt), Megan (Haley Bennet), and Anna (Rebecca Ferguson). Without being too specific their lives are interlinked and Rachel provides the narrative thread as she observes the other two from her commuter train.

One morning Rachel seems something troubling from her carriage. Later we discover one of the other women is missing and Rachel may hold the key to the mystery. Rachel however is an alcoholic and spends her days in a daze as it were, so she is not regarded as reliable.

The story moves as though it were on rails itself. There is no depth, no characterisation, in fact not much of any interest until the mystery is solved. It is a by the numbers thriller with plot points and action beats ticked off with joyless regularity and everyone behaving as they do simply because that’s how characters in movies like this behave.

I felt especially sorry for Emily Blunt, a fine actor who gets to exhibit a series of characteristics without ever getting close to playing a character. She is little more than a walking exposition dump as her voice over tells us what’s going on and how everyone is feeling.

It’s just a thought but maybe now and then director Tate Taylor might have shown us instead of just telling us. This is lazy story telling.

There is no reason to empathise with Rachel apart from common human decency about the fact that bad things keep happening to her. In spite of this she carries on doing illogical things because if she – or anyone else – exhibited a fraction of common sense the film would fall apart. The same can be said of Bennet and Ferguson, they are cyphers not characters. There is no sense of internal life, just mechanical plot points.

The mechanistic nature of the film extends to Taylor’s direction which gives this the feel of a TV movie and, sadly, the cinematography of Charlotte Bruus Christensen. The film seems static and lifeless and when you compare this to her work on The Hunt (2012) or Far from the Madding Crowd (2015) it’s a major disappointment.

One final thought as my mind wandered during this film. It’s a film aimed at women, based on a best-seller written by a woman which was bought by hundreds of thousands of women, and it has been adapted by a women. Why then did I feel that there was a rather nasty judgemental tone to the whole proceedings?

If we consider the three characters here, one is an infertile drunk, another has lost a child and wants no more, while the third stole another woman’s man; they do not conform to generic wife and mother stereotypes. I couldn’t help feeling that the film exists only to judge these women and then punish them for their choices. That, to me, doesn’t seem terribly empowering in this day and age.