The Owens sisters, played by Nicole Kidman and Sandra Bullock, return to the big screen in Practical Magic 2. The movie, directed by Susanne Bier (In a Better World, Bird Box), is a sequel to Practical Magic (both films are based on books by Alice Hoffman) and comes almost twenty years after the 1998 cult hit. It follows Gillian (Kidman) and Sally (Bullock) and Sally’s two children, Antonia (Maisie Williams) and Kylie (Joey King) some time in the future after the events of the first movie. Antonia, a younger of the newest generation of Owens sisters, is a medical resident, and Kylie, the older sister, is an undergraduate student. Dianne Wiest and Stockard Channing also reprise their roles as the matriarchs of the Owens women, Jet and Franny. While following the basic structure and world set up in the first movie, it unfortunately fails to deliver any of the same magic.
The story of the Practical Magic movies is simple. Many generations ago, Maria Owens, a witch, was so stricken with grief stemming from falling in love with a man that she cast a spell to curse any of her ancestors with the hopes of preventing them from the same fate. As a result of the spell, any man who falls in love with an Owens woman is cursed to die. Because of the curse, Sally and Gillian have tried to avoid falling in love. Sally failed twice, leading to two men dying. After experiencing loss, she vows to hide the fact that her children are witches, and does not tell them about the curse. Of course, the second movie then focuses on her daughter, Kylie, who falls in love with her college boyfriend, which leads to him getting hit by a car and falling into a coma, which forces the Owens women to attempt to break the family curse once and for all.
Yet despite its simplicity, the story provides more questions than answers. What happened to Sally’s second love? What year is this sequel set in (there are smartphones, and the lead actresses are close to 60 years old, yet the children have only aged 10 years)? Did the sisters live together in that house with their aunts while still trying to hide their magic?
The filmmaking does little to distract from these questions. Immediately, the movie deploys aggressive anamorphic lenses, providing a fisheye effect that is distracting and ugly. The crew spent significant time and resources building an entire replica of the house from the first film, meticulously recreating the details that made the first movie feel so whimsical, but this hard work is undone by the severe blurring caused by the lenses. Several of the scenes inside of the house are filmed with these curved lenses from the ceiling or from a wide shot on the edge of the room, making it feel like you’re watching these women through the peephole of a hotel door. The effect is that the viewer is even further removed from the scenery and the relationships they’re supposed to be interested in.
The movie also relies on uninteresting, unnecessary CGI effects to depict the magic, which is disheartening. Movies are their own form of magic, so I’m largely uninterested in watching movies about magic (especially when that magic is described as ‘practical’!) with heavy CGI and no whimsy. You can’t take shortcuts on the titular hook, particularly when we know it’s possible to create something so incredible through the visual medium of a movie. The magic in this movie is brutish and aggressive and so far from subtle, as opposed to the fun, practical effects of the first movie.
To be clear, the first Practical Magic is not a perfect piece of cinema. It is rife with plot holes and is more campy than it is actually good. But it is also a fun story of sisterhood and love with some great music cues, a beautiful set, stunning women in their prime, and a very reasonable 105-minute runtime. The same cannot be said for Practical Magic 2, which comes in at 130 minutes and feels like 400 minutes. Part of the reason the minutes drag in this movie is because it is crammed full of the expected fan service of references to the first movie without any furtherance of the themes that make the first one shine.
Without even comparing the legacy sequel to the original, it still fails on its own. The movie exclusively tells instead of shows, relying on shoddy dialogue that somehow required three writers to accomplish. The movie preaches that “no magic is stronger than sisterhood” while completely neglecting one of the younger Owens sisters. Maisie Williams’s Antonia is barely on screen and has no character arc. Antonia’s aunt Gillian has the same problem—existing only to antagonize (and borderline flirt with) her sister Sally and to remind her nieces not to fall in love. The characters spend the two hour runtime talking about being sisters, and verbally reminding the audience of the curse, without demonstrating any actual love between the sisters or any convincing examples of romantic love. Lee Pace, who plays Ian Wright, a professor of magic, and the third love interest of Bullock’s Sally, tries his best with the little he’s given to work with. Joey King’s Kylie is given less than a handful of minutes with her love interest, played by Xolo Maridueña.
The movie has a handful of compelling moments, especially when Stockard Channing and Sandra Bullock are on screen, but the movie’s biggest failure is in how it is completely incapable of sitting in any kind of earnest scene. Almost every single moment of emotional momentum is ruined by the disastrous CGI or the unintelligible script. During what should be an emotional moment near the end (but still so far from the end because there are at least 3 endings to this movie), Stockard Channing delivers a beautiful performance that is cut up by digitally-enhanced flashes of Dianne Wiest’s character. It’s unnecessary and shatters what could be the emotional heart of the film. In every instance that the movie could have pulled me in, it almost immediately pulled me right back out. Maybe there were too many cooks in the kitchen with this movie, because it certainly felt like there was no clear vision for the tone of the movie.
What makes me the angriest is that there was so much potential. Sandra Bullock is one of the funniest actresses in the world. Nicole Kidman is so fun and whimsical on her own. The fact that Dianne and Stockard are not only still around, but down to be in a sequel, is a gift. And while it should be celebrated that a movie led by two women who are closer to 60 than to 50 received a substantial budget and performed well on its opening weekend, that’s not enough to call this a success. In what could have been a film full of laughter and tears, the only tears were tears of boredom and the only laughs were at the expense of the script. The heavy-handed attempts to cram nostalgia back down the audience’s throat is akin to brewing a potion to force someone to love you. And as we all know, love potions never work. Neither does this legacy sequel.
