Despite its expensive-looking costumes and flash digital effects. Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore is a bit of a mess, says Simon Morris.
Simon Morris: Unlike some of my snobbier friends, I have nothing against a big Hollywood franchise per se.
They're clearly following something that worked pretty well, with appealing characters and storyline.
But even the best of them sometimes end up a bit like homework. Each episode you have to remember a wee bit more.
Star Wars and Star Trek were the worst - Where are we? Which one is he again? - though after 25-plus movies, Marvel Comics films are equally demanding now.
To their credit though, you can generally pick up the thread five minutes or so into the latest episode. Unlike, I'm sorry to say, JK Rowling's prequel to Harry Potter, Fantastic Beasts.
But the Potter films' appeal wasn't in the Dark Arts and the magical creatures. It was the fact that, at its heart, it was an old-fashioned English school story.
It followed young Harry, and his best friends Ron and Hermione, from Day 1 at Hogwarts to final breakup. Defeating evil wizards was just a bonus.
Fantastic Beasts is nothing so graspable. In fact, it never really settles.
The nominal lead is boyish Eddie Redmayne as an innocent naturalist finding magical animals. Sort of a cross between Tintin and David Attenborough.
Along the way, he meets Muggle Jacob Kowalski - an "ordinary bloke", for any Muggles out there - and magical sisters Tina and Queenie Goldstein.
The two boys sort of fall in love with the two sisters, and then find themselves fighting a baddie called Grindelwald, played by first Colin Farrell, and then Johnny Depp.
Now he's played by Mads Mikkelson.
Well, somewhere along the way Tina Goldstein fell by the wayside - pity, I liked her, Queenie became a baddie... wait, what? And who should leap into the series but a young Professor Dumbledore from Hogwarts School?
Now in the Potter books and films, Dumbledore popped up as an occasionally helpful adult. But in the Fantastic Beasts films, as played by Jude Law, he starts to hog the whole series.
It seems Dumbledore and Grindelwald used to be an item - hence the blood-filled doo-dad round his neck.
The next thing that happens in The Secrets of Dumbledore… and may I concur with the many critics who've questioned the title. What secrets are these, exactly? Everything seems well and truly out in the open, I'd have thought.
Anyway, the next thing that happens is Dumbledore invites Newt the Naturalist to summon a gang together to stop Grindelwald.
The obvious thing here would be to retrieve Jacob and the Goldstein sisters from the first movie. You know, get the band back together sort of thing.
But no. JK Rowling, who writes the scripts for these films, insists on forming a whole new band.
All right, as a sop to the increasingly desperate studio that's funding these things, Jacob is allowed back in, mostly as comedy relief.
Here Jacob, have a wand. See what you can do with that.
Despite being, I thought, the hero, Newt has less and less to do. Certainly not as much as Dumbledore who keeps turning up unexpectedly and then going away.
Structurally, The Secrets of Dumbledore is a mess, despite its trendily diverse characters, its expensive-looking costumes and its increasingly intrusive digital effects.
It doesn't even have the appeal of the Potter films' genius casting.
Mads Mikkelson does his best, but he simply proves that the word "Muggle" only works with an English actor saying it.
There are regular quotes from Harry Potter throughout, but they're like favourite haunts glimpsed from a speeding train.
In the end, nothing much happens, apart from an increasingly over-confident hint at another sequel nobody's asking for.
I wonder who'll play Grindelwald in the next one? I believe Will Smith is very reasonable at the moment.
