It felt like the creators (?) literally said to each other, "This is the Harry Potter world! People love this stuff! Let's just make sequences that go on and on and on. They'll eat it up! They won't care whether the participants do things that make sense or seem to have a single pair of functioning neurons between them!" The particular failure is in the main character. Most of the time, Eddie Redmayne does one of two things: affects an obnoxiously clueless, staring leer as he passively watches events unfold around him; or listlessly chasing after creatures he can't possibly capture by hand, having somehow forgotten that he has wizardly ways of obtaining them without provoking them to destroy everything within a half-mile.

Even the music was uninspired; but against the memory of John Williams, what isn't? Oh, there were good effects, and eye-candy sequences, and a few isolated moments of interesting characters. But the whole was far, far less than the sum of the parts.

Just disappointing.