The Magic is Gone
Seriously, who is this movie for?
Practical Magic 2
Director: Susanne Bier • Writers: Akiva Goldsman, Georgia Pritchett, Kelly Marcel, based on the book by Alice Hoffman
Starring: Sandra Bullock, Nicole Kidman, Joey King, Maisie Williams, Lee Pace
USA • 2hrs 10mins
Opens Hong Kong September 10 • IIA
Grade: D
Almost 30 years after Practical Magic flopped and became a cult hit after the fact, here comes the legacy sequel everyone was… wait, did anyone ask for this? As far as Practical Magic 2 goes, I have questions: How did the characters become the polar opposites of what they were? Was Sandra Bullock always just a bitch? Is it wrong to admit the cosmetic surgery was distracting"? Why did writers Akiva Goldsman, Georgia Pritchett and Kelly Marcel wait so long to include, I don’t know, a plot in the lazy script? How exactly do you make Lee Pace boring and unsexy? Why is this movie 130 minutes long, a full half-hour longer than the first? Has Nicole Kidman ever picked up and held a domestic animal? Can the dialogue legally be called a crime against humanity? And when is Personal Movie Bugbear #11 – fools walking into a room/waking up/stepping out of the shower/etc, kissing and then saying, “Hi” All coy like – going to fuck off?
As scattered and messy as Griffin Dunne’s ultra-’90s, folksy, shot-on-film original rah-rah sisterhood trifle was, it went from A to Z, and had some stealth (so, so, so stealth) commentary on how women can be pushed to extremes and have no recourse, and that as a monolith women are very, very powerful. It rode a wave of small town, witchy comedies (The Craft, Death Becomes Her, Hocus Pocus, the OG and the only one that counts, The Witches of Eastwick) clumsily but it eventually found its audience, and with the legacy sequel frenzy seemingly having no end in sight, the signs and portents were there. Top Gun: Maverick pulled off the legacy sequel brilliantly. This is not that.
Why is this movie?
Susanne Bier picks up for Dunne and deploys more skin deep Bird Box craft (hee hee) than layered After the Wedding filmmaking for PM2, which starts with not one voice-over but three, in one of which we hear reluctant witch Sally Owens (Bullock, last seen in the wildly superior The Lost City four years ago) drone on about what happened to the cop in the original, and how she swore her sister Gillian (Kidman) to secrecy about “what we are” and the curse that plagues all Owens women from her kids. In case you’re unfamiliar with PM lore, it’s the same United Federation of Planets curse: Anyone the captain, or Owens, loves dies. It’s why Gillian devoted herself to a life of slutitude and Sally is a two-time widow. The eccentric, Gray Gardens-ready Aunties Franny and Jetty (Stockard Channing and Dianne Wiest) are back in time to die. Shit hits the fan when Sally’s daughter Kylie (Joey King, not Evan Rachel Wood) gets a beauhunk, Gideon (Blue Beetle’s Xolo Maridueña), and after a night of “Hi” she mutters “Love you” and puts him in the ICU. You lied to me blah blah blah, I’m going to end this curse blah blah blah, I’m coming with you, you need me, blah blah blah and off Sally and Gillan go to witch burning central to end this shit forever. They get help from Professor Tattoo, or Ian Wright (Pace), an academic who studies magic (that’s a thing) and a local farming lad, Thomas (Solly McLeod, who is much better as Sasha on Apple TV’s Star City), and deal with their generational trauma.
In one of the opening voice-overs Sally (I think) mentions that we are all forced to reckon with the past that never truly lets us go. Talk about an omen. Practical Magic 2 is so obsessed with reliving its past (whether we want to see it or not) that it does nothing to move forward – primarily in recognising that itself is history and should stay there. It feels weirdly out of step as well, given overpacking is the big joke here, or maybe it’s Sally’s Bullock-style™ flustered reaction to meeting Wright while he’s nekkid on a table, I don’t know, but the comedy is sorely lacking. That’s odd considering Pritchett has contributed to Shaun the Sheep (!) and Succession (!!), though even she clearly can’t hold back Marcel’s Cruella and Terra Nova (!!!) schlock power. But there’s no firm concept of what this movie is. Were the writers siloed from each other, is that why it’s a romance, a supernatural thriller, a road trip and a family drama – but simultaneously none of those? Gone is quaint, witchy Maine. Gone is any semblance of logic as to why these women all live together. Gone is Gillian’s messy-slutty charm, and gone is the other daughter. Maisie Williams gets so little to do as Antonia she might as well have been voice-overed out too.
A major point of the legacy sequel is to set up the next generation of characters within a given world that will carry on the story and keep the shareholder dividends rolling in. Rumour has it the next Top Gun film will focus us the young guys Maverick introduced. Top Gun is the gold standard for these because the film (and Tom Cruise) understood where to mine nostalgia and where to acknowledge the march of time. If you have a soft spot for the first film, great. Enjoy it. But Practical Magic 2 does nothing other than bring its relic status into sharp relief.