Cinemazlowski Double Review: 'Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them' and 'Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk'

Nov 18, 2016

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them

What's a movie studio to do when it runs out of ideas in a film series that made $7.7 billion worldwide? Create a spin-off series that they hope will carry many of the original fans along with it.
 
That's what Warner Bros. is attempting to do this weekend with the release of "Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them," which is an offshoot of the eight-film "Harry Potter" series following the misadventures of another magically-powered fellow named Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne). The idea is that Newt wrote a magic guidebook of the same name that Harry has previously studied, and that Newt is also a Hogwarts graduate who is beloved by Dumbledore. With fans having waited five years for more magical misadventures, it's highly likely that this will be casting a spell at the box office as well.
 
Newt has sailed across the ocean to New York City in 1926, carrying a suitcase filled with magical creatures that are also hopelessly mischievous. Newt is sneaking the creatures back into the U.S. in order to set them free in their natural habitats here, but trouble soon explodes when he and a non-magic New Yorker named Kowalski (Dan Fogler) cross paths and Kowalski accidentally walks off with Newt's suitcase.
 
Soon, the beasts – ranging from a comical platypus-like creature who keeps breaking into bank vaults and jewelry stores and eating all the gold it can find, to a giant glowing rhinoceros-style beast that wreaks havoc in the Central Park Zoo – are dashing through New York and destroying streets and builidings. But there's a more malevolent force at hand, a fierce combination of wind and cloud and spectre, that's tearing the city apart at even greater levels - and it's emanating from a young girl with magic powers who must be found ASAP.
 
There's far more to the plot, with Newt finding Kowalski and teaming up to save New York City together, Kowalski and Newt each finding romantic sparks with a pair of magically powered sisters, and a secret magical congress trying to order everyone around. It's a lot of fun, for the most part, with much of it feeling like the first two "Night at the Museum" movies with a supernatural twist.
 
Yet, like Newt's magical suitcase, "Fantastic Beasts" is ultimately overstuffed. With so many plot lines to juggle, the movie's pacing is occasionally disjointed and while it's an entertaining experience overall, some sequences drag too long and others feel rushed.
 
Redmayne makes a fun hero to watch, dressed like Dr. Who and bringing an incredulous spirit to his performance that makes him eminently relatable to the audience. He seems as surprised as anyone by the mayhem around him, and it's refreshing to see him in a light role after his Oscar-winning turn as Stephen Hawking in "The Theory of Everything" and last year's grating performance as the first man ever to receive gender reassignment surgery in "The Danish Girl."
 
But it's Fogler as Kowalski who's the movie's MVP. Every moment he's onscreen pops with comic energy, while his sad-sack everyman persona also makes a great person to root for romantically.

Surprisingly, "Fantastic" marks "Potter" creator J.K. Rowling's first foray into actual screenwriting, and all things considered, she's conceived a world that will be fun for multiple adventures to come. Teaming with David Yates, who helmed the last four "Potter" films, the plan is to create four more Newt Scamander movies over the next eight years.
 
There's a deep well of acting talent eager to get in on the action here, with Colin Farrell, Samantha Morton and Katherine Waterston – all veteran performers of note – playing key roles. This bodes well for future magic in the sequels, particularly from a last-minute superstar whose reveal as a key villain marks both a surprise and a perfect casting at once.
 
As always, the "Potter"/"Fantastic" universe contains no foul language, sex or nudity, no dirty jokes or innuendos, and the violence is of a fantastical, lighthearted variety. There's a few moments that could be considered scary, but the only possible moral concern to worry about is if some parents worry about the idea of magic being presented as a positive thing to be involved with. I've always felt that these movies   are so innocently created that the filmmakers' intentions are not nefarious at all and there's nothing to fear here, but I certainly won't tell parents they're wrong if they disagree. 

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk
 
There have been breakthrough moments in the history of film technology, from the creation of talkies through the addition of color, and the coming, going and resurgence of 3D movie popularity. Add in Technicolor, 70 mm projection and the use of Cinerama along the way and one can find a long list of innovations that either became a standard practice in filmmaking or a noble failure.

Rank the new movie "Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk" among the list of failures, which is a surprising shame considering it comes from the usually superb filmmaker Ang Lee. Lee has brought the poetic grace of martial arts to the screen in stunning fashion in "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," broke the box office taboo against depicting gay romance with "Brokeback Mountain" and crafted dazzling uses of CGI effects in "The Life of Pi."

However, Lee also brought us the notorious failure of 2003's "The Hulk," which mixed ridiculously awkward cartoonish effects to bring the green monster to life amid a cast of human actors. And he's got a similarly garish mashup of styles working against him in his new film.

Lee shot the film at 120 frames per second (fps), rather than the standard filming process of 24 fps. The first-of-its-kind effort was intended to immerse viewers in the film, particularly in a few intense military combat scenes, but the result actually gives the film a disorienting flat look that's also so vivid that it serves as a distraction from the plot -which is a good thing, in this case.

Based on a novel of the same name by Ben Fountain, "Halftime" focuses on a 19-year-old soldier named Billy Lynn (Joe Alwyn), who becomes a national hero during the Iraq War in 2004 after killing an enemy soldier who had just shot a beloved sergeant named Shroom (Vin Diesel) and his heroics are inadvertently caught on videotape. He and his unit, known as Bravo Squad, have been sent by the US government on a national tour to hype the war and support soldiers, and most of the film depicts a day in which they are being honored at a Thanksgiving football game's halftime show.

As the fresh-faced yet secretly troubled Lynn and his compatriots await their turn in the spotlight, the narrative alternates between the positive face he must wear during his experiences with fans, a press conference, a hot cheerleader who wants to give him something special for his heroics, and the shaken, sad reality he hides while drifting into flashback memories of life in Iraq and back home in Texas.

This may sound like potentially interesting fodder for a film, but something in the script by Jean-Christophe Castelli is extremely off. The characters largely have no depth to them, all the non-combat scenes are staged with the same, utterly inert energy and the combination of those factors combined with its extremely confusing flashback structure make "Halftime" literally impossible to care about.

I've been an ardent opponent of the US military's Middle East adventures since the Persian Gulf War, and should have been the perfect audience for a film attempting to make a sly and subtle series of points against the war. But on top of all the bad writing and pacing issues already mentioned, the film devolves at a few key points into outright speech-making by characters, and the score by Jeff and Mychael Danna is mostly unheard except for extremely awkward twangy guitar that springs out of nowhere whenever a character discusses something meant to be taken very seriously.

One is left to wonder why Lee and his crew made the effort to shoot this film differently at all, because there are few if any scenes that call for an intensely unique look to draw viewers in. Much of the movie consists of Billy and his fellow soldiers sitting or walking in uniform while waiting for their big halftime moment, and the rest consists of a series of flashbacks that rarely feature action.

There's nothing here in the script or performances to make viewers say "Wow," so why bother trying to do so at no doubt great expense visually? While the lead performances by Alwyn (a young Leonardo DiCaprio clone), Kristen Stewart and Diesel are solid, it's almost maddening to see supporting turns by Chris Tucker and Steve Martin in a movie that gives them little to do, knowing that they have been avoiding sharing their talents in starring roles for years now.

The movie isn't really offensive anywhere, with some uses of the F word that are scattered throughout the film but don't seem out of place considering these are soldiers who are angry about what they have gone through in battle. It's implied that Billy has sex with a cheerleader, but nothing is shown in that scene, though he also has a brief fantasy scene of having sex with her back home in Texas if they were married that is quick but frenzied, with no actual nudity shown. The war violence has some bloody imagery but there's not much of it, and nothing is more graphic than other R-rated war films such as "Saving Private Ryan" or "Hacksaw Ridge."  

"Halftime" stands as one of the strangest, most disappointing films of the year, and most audiences will be happy to end their own suffering by walking out long before the movie's own midpoint.