PRACTICAL MAGIC 2 Review: Second Time Isn't a Charm
When Practical Magic was released in 1998, no one probably thought it would become a special movie for a whole slew of teenage girls and young women.
And not just because of witchery, black cats, and pointy hats, even though that’s always fun, unless you’re a woman in the 17th century Massachusetts.
The real, practical magic was the fact that, in a pretty male-centered movie era, out came the film about sisterhood, where a romantic storyline was almost an afterthought, Sally and Gillian Owens were each other’s person years before Meredith Grey and Cristina Yang graced our screens, and there was an impressive message about reclaiming your “otherness” and going along with it inside it all.
So, there was never a chance that, in the current landscape of legacy sequels and remakes, this movie wouldn't get its own. There was also very little chance that Practical Magic 2 would be good. Primarily because there is no real reason for this story to be continued (despite the existence of Alice Hoffman's books that mostly served as inspiration for the original) besides financial ones. But also, because the existing rules for those kinds of nostalgia-exploiting sequels are mind-numbingly terrible and have yet to produce great results.
And yet, here we go again. Despite witchery and magic right in the middle of the plot (and the title), all the authors of Practical Magic 2 have come up with this time around is the same curse that plagued Owens women in the original: Every man who falls in love with any of them dies. Sally (Sandra Bullock), Gillian (Nicole Kidman), and their eccentric aunts, Jet (Dianne Wiest) and Franny (Stockard Channing), thought they conquered it at the end of the first film, but no such luck. After Sally’s second husband dies between two movies, she realizes that the curse is still on, blocks her magic, and erases her young daughters’ memories of anything witch-related.
This doesn’t sound like a great plan for a whole number of reasons, all of which prove to be valid years later, when Sally’s older daughter, Kylie (Joey King), falls in love with a guy (Xolo Maridueña), because she and her sister, Antonia (Maisie Williams), have no idea they’re actually not supposed to do that. Kylie’s love quickly backfires as her boyfriend ends up in a hospital in a coma. Kylie finds out the truth and sets out to break the curse with the help of a creepy-looking book that guides her straight to England, her mother and aunt on her heels.
As the trailer announced ahead of time, there is also Lee Pace’s Professor Wright, who is British, has spent his life studying magic, and looks fantastic without clothes, but none of this -- actually, none of what happens during the film’s runtime -- really matters. The authors are secure in their belief that the audience is here for the same things they were charmed by in 1998: the margaritas, the Owens sisters’ cardigans, Harry Nilsson’s Coconut, the works. The memory-erasing plot also conveniently allows director Susanne Bier, who replaced Griffin Dunne, to repeat some of the bits from the first film almost verbatim.
Given all that, it’s almost ironic that the ending result looks less like the original Practical Magic and more like The Devil Wears Prada 2, as it follows the same narrative pattern and even borrows its unfortunately flat visual aesthetics. The incessant nostalgia can be survived, though, even if it’s being ridden harder than the horse in Na Hong-jin’s Hope. What’s lethal for any hope of this film making a lasting impression, along with wasting some serious talent (especially when it comes to Wiest and Channing), is the same sin The Devil Wears Prada 2 committed: Butchering everything that might have felt special before.
While trying to do the very same thing that worked the first time around, the film manages to turn everything and everyone in it into a parody of themselves (and the romantic subplots are now at the center of it all). Despite somehow wearing almost the exact same clothes 25 years later (not as great a sign of character development as the authors seem to think), Bullock and Kidman now have to play awkward caricatures of not only their heroines, but of actual human beings.
As suggested by the film’s title and the unspoken rules of creative writing, there should be some parting joke incorporating the word “magic” at this point, but there simply isn’t enough of it in here even to land as a pun.
The film is now playing, only in movie theaters, via Warner Bros. Visit their official site for locations and showtimes.
