by Cain Noble-Davies
Worth: $10.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Nicole Kidman, Sandra Bullock, Joey King, Maisie Williams, Dianne Wiest, Stockard Channing, Lee Pace
Intro:
… bland isn’t much of an improvement over outright terrible.
The witchcraft boom of the late ‘90s produced some classics, some duds, and some that got stuck in the middle. The Goth chic of The Craft, the phenomenon of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, the suburban sisterhood of Charmed, even the godmother of modern found footage The Blair Witch Project; it was a blessed time for the blessed bes. And nestled amongst the nostalgic faves and certified classics was a little film called Practical Magic, which offered a more cozy, cottagecore, ‘midnight margaritas with a dash of pumpkin spice’ alternative to the Gen X vibes of its contemporaries. It didn’t cast that strong a spell over the general public, but it’s garnered something of a cult following, like a less boisterous Hocus Pocus.
Cut to more recent years, and just about every mainstay of that initial boom has attempted to reassert themselves in the modern day… with minimal success. The Craft: Legacy was more of a half-hearted crossover with The Covenant than anything else. Any news of a Buffy reboot has languished in development hell for a while now with only a continued presence in comics, and even that has been shaky, right up to a Kelly Thompson-led reboot by Dynamite being indefinitely delayed at time of writing (dammit!). The Charmed reboot was basically an exercise in speedrunning seasonal rot, racing through every bad decision that sank the original and even inventing new ones whole cloth. And Blair Witch… well, Book Of Shadows was an absolute load, but the 2017 follow-up got a bad rap.
And then, as if conjured out of thin air, we now have Practical Magic 2, a film that not even its own die-hards were likely expecting. Does it join its fallen sisters in failing to adapt to the new ways, or does its particular book of shadows still carry some power?
The original Practical Magic had its high points (Sally casting a love spell while flower petals and Alan Silvestri’s gorgeous score ascend towards Hecate; true magic right there!) but its greatest flaw was its tone and genre focus… or, rather, a lack of one. Family drama, magic-assisted rom-com, police procedural, dark abusive thriller; it tried a bit of everything and came out lopsided as a result.
Practical Magic 2, by contrast, is far more streamlined. It brings back the Owens’ family love curse (which was left vaguely open-ended last time), with Sally’s daughter Kylie (Joey King) deciding to break it once and for all… no matter the cost. Everything down to the subplots involving darkly charming academics and British countryside are in service to that key point, picking up the loose thread and properly tying it off.
However, that thread doesn’t end up being enough to carry an entire film, especially one this long. A lot of the dialogue scenes between the Owenses end up being more about the vibes and chemistry than anything relevant, and at best, reiterate information either already done to death in previous scenes or foreshadowed with the subtlety of a frying pan to the back of the head. The cast still have chemistry, and King opposite Maisie Williams capture a similar warmth and sisterly intimacy as Bullock and Kidman back in the day… but Bullock and Kidman now aren’t on that same wavelength, and the attempts to find their way back to it hit some odd notes. An out-of-nowhere pantsing scene would’ve been awkward even back in the day, let alone now, at this age.
While the wandering plot progression, the overreaching attempts at emotional beats, the jarring product placement (we did not need to hear an argument about Cool Whip), and a colour palette closer to Twilight than its own predecessor, are all worrisome enough, there’s an even bigger issue looming; it’s a film about sisterhood, about feminine power and reclaiming one’s happiness… that just can’t help but sideline those same sisters. Dianne Wiest and Stockard Channing as the Owens aunts, delightful as they are, are both glorified cameos and largely tucked away for pure narrative convenience. And then there’s poor Maisie Williams as Antonia, who just ends up being a standing lamp in scrubs for whatever scraps of screentime she gets, while Joey King gets the lion’s share of focus and ‘development’. Taking an actress who could make the likes of iBoy and even The New Mutants watchable, and doing next-to-nothing with her, is intensely disappointing. Add to that how ineffectual and arrested-development Sally and Gillian are here, and ‘Nothing is stronger than sisterhood’ ends up feeling like a backhanded insult towards all on-screen parties, rather than a rallying cry.
Practical Magic 2 is a pumpkin spice latte that’s been left to cool on the counter for over two decades. It gets credit both for finding a solid reason to continue with this series, and for addressing one of the original’s most frequent criticisms, but that only reveals just how thin its magic system was to begin with. The performances are lacklustre and woefully mismanaged (Lee Pace deserves a bloody Oscar for making any of his dialogue sound as good as it does), the presentation is washed-out and dreary, and instead of feeling like you can kick your feet up and relax for a while (which even the original, for all its darker spasms, managed to accomplish), it’s all so dull and lifeless that it’s likely to just put you to sleep standing. In the larger context of its fellow legacy wiccans, it not being actively objectionable or directly harming its predecessor by proximity gives it something of an edge, but bland isn’t much of an improvement over outright terrible.
