Practical Magicwas nobody’s idea of a success when it hit theaters way back in 1998 — its box office take was modest at best, and critics were not kind to it. Its cozy fall vibes, (some rather mixed) messaging about sisterhood and female empowerment and fun performances from superstars Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman, however, led it to become a seasonal staple on cable television, and it eventually found enough of an audience for a high-profile, nearly-30-years-later sequel to make financial sense in our nostalgia-obsessed world.
I watched the original for the first time ahead of the screening of the new one, and found it to be a tonally confused, badly paced mess, despite committed work from the lead actors, as well as from Dianne Wiest and Stockard Channing as the aunts. The movie is decidedly uninterested in witchcraft, except as a means of advancing its story of love and loss — a potent idea, but one that gets buried beneath various subplots with wildly different tones. Centering this story on two women who are uniquely powerful but must hide it from society lest they be labeled witches is also an interesting concept, though it’s muddled by the fact that these women are, canonically, witches.
In Practical Magic 2,based on the fourth book in the popular series by Alice Hoffman, the Owens sisters must confront the dark curse that threatens to unravel their family once and for all. In the original film, the Owens sisters discover a family curse that causes all the men they truly love to die, leading them to adopt two different lifestyles to cope with it. Now, this curse has passed down to Bullock’s children, with disastrous consequences.
All the principal actors are back, except for Evan Rachel Wood as one of Bullock’s daughters, who was replaced by Joey King, since the characters are meant to be in college. Bullock and Kidman have fantastic chemistry in the movie, and that energy has carried over to the press tour, with viral clips dominating the web in the run-up to the movie’s release. Bullock has kept herself so scarce cinematically that seeing her onscreen is always exciting; she feels like one of the few true movie stars we have left who hasn’t completely oversaturated the market or overstayed their welcome.
I acknowledge that these movies are not really for me — I want my movies about witches to do more with the dark arts than make margaritas and flicker the lights — and this sequel will likely satisfy fans who are simply eager to spend more time with these characters and their world. I found the movie’s use of the legacy-sequel framework uninspiring and was never fully engaged with the story, which I felt hewed too closely to the original, both in content and in the way it’s all so loosely connected.
The biggest issue, though, is with the screenplay. The movie is so all over the place that a “villain” is introduced and dealt with within a 10-minute span, then the movie climaxes, ostensibly wrapping everything up, only to go on for another 20 minutes that are absolutely useless and deadly. The plotting on the way there is as perfunctory as it gets, involving a magic book and a trip abroad to find answers dating back to their ancestral home.
Practical Magic 2 is just as dopey as the first movie — arguably more so — but it’s certainly going to fare far better than its predecessor at the box office. But hey, I’m all for studios like Warner Bros. mining their back catalogs for unexpectedly viable IP and capitalizing on cult fandom. People who love the first film will likely have a good enough time, and the box office could also use a Sandra Bullock infusion. The best we can hope for is that the next legacy sequel, plucked from onetime obscurity and based on a cable-TV-era cult classic, finds a more compelling reason to exist.
Practical Magic 2 opens Friday, Sept. 11.
