Legacy sequels are like a cinematic machine engineered to turn audiences’ nostalgia into cold, hard cash. If a decades-old movie lives on in the public consciousness, persevering through the years and maintaining a kind of devotion among fans, the options at movie studios’ disposal used to include reissues, collector’s-edition physical media sets, or good old-fashioned merchandising. But in the last decade-plus, studios and executives have gotten wise to the inherent appeal of the legacy sequel: a nostalgic dusting off of an old but beloved property.
This is not to say that all legacy sequels are bad. There have been plenty of great ones in the past decade, such as Top Gun: Maverick. However, it does feel like we’ve reached a point now, more than a decade after the craze really got launched into high gear by the joint successes of Jurassic World and Star Wars: The Force Awakens, at which point franchises are getting trotted back out that you’re not sure anyone has really been begging to revisit in the first place. Practical Magic 2 is the pinnacle of this, and it feels like it has been from the very start.
All of the marketing materials for this sequel played like the movie was accidentally greenlit by a hungover executive the day after Beetlejuice Beetlejuice premiered to instant success. Unfortunately, the film itself is so bad that it already has me nostalgically looking back upon those cookie-cutter trailers through rose-colored glasses because, at least, they weren’t the total affront to my senses that this film is.
TOP FIVE THINGS ABOUT “PRACTICAL MAGIC 2”
5. All Tell, No Show
I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t love the original Practical Magic from 1998, but I at least found it interesting. Also, anecdotally, it is a film that my wife loves dearly, and she has been so fucking jazzed for this sequel for, like, a full year. Therefore, getting to take her to the premiere was something I was looking forward to immensely. If anyone was going to like Practical Magic 2, I feel like it was my wife, and, well… she didn’t.
There’s this old standby in screenwriting and moviemaking that you’re supposed to “show, don’t tell.” In other words, you want the audience to feel the events of the story unfolding rather than simply feel like a list of events is being recited to them. The opening few minutes of Practical Magic 2 consist of a montage of miscellaneous footage heavily narrated by Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman’s lead witchy characters. It throws approximately a movie and a half’s worth of development at you in a monotone voice and then just expects you to kind of roll with it. It turns out that all of the events of the first film’s final act have been completely nullified, and now there’s an entirely new status quo driven by motivations and emotional epiphanies that happened entirely off-screen. What fun!
This is an absolutely baffling way to start the film, as it immediately creates a chasm of dissonance between the movie and its audience, and it only gets worse from there.
4. The Music Conundrum
The first Practical Magic film had some pretty significant strengths when it came to the music department. It featured some solid song choices and needle drops, many of which felt appropriately witchy and meshed well with the tone of the film. Furthermore, the score was by composer Alan Silvestri, who is iconic and has never delivered anything less than a sublime accompaniment, regardless of the project he’s working on.
I say this to say that Practical Magic 2’s shortcomings in the music department are thus all the more egregiously apparent. The musical score this time around comes from Rupert Gregson-Williams, and it features some of the limpest orchestrations you’re likely to hear in a big-budget production this year. It’s all paper-thin and sounds like temp music that exists solely as a placeholder. There’s also shockingly little of it, with entire chunks of the film going without any musical accompaniment. I’m generally a fan of a lighter touch in this regard, but Practical Magic 2 is so lacking in anything resembling momentum or palpable charisma that this approach backfires and makes the whole thing feel glacially slow.
And while the sequel does feature some solid songs as needle drops, it never feels for a second like the movie has earned them in any way. They become a crutch rather than an accentuation. Nowhere is this more apparent than in an early scene in which the movie cranks up “Landslide” in a blatant and garish attempt to evoke emotions in a way that the movie itself is utterly incapable of.
3. Checked Out Performances
This is a movie that stars Sandra Bullock, Nicole Kidman, and Lee Pace. These are three incredibly talented performers, all of whom I have deliberately gone out of my way to see movies for before, simply because I enjoy seeing them perform onscreen. And yet, between the lackluster filmmaking craft on display (this movie features some of the laziest direction I’ve seen this year, as if the production made a game out of seeing how few camera setups they could do for a given scene—and boy, does it fucking show) and the baffling writing, something has gone incredibly awry here and left the performers high and dry.
To her credit, Kidman is at least trying, but the movie simply leaves her with little to do. She doesn’t get anything resembling an arc and is essentially relegated to being stuck in the same gear for the sum total of the movie’s obscenely bloated runtime. But Bullock? I absolutely cannot say the same for her, as not only is she uncharacteristically, painfully unfunny throughout the film, but she also just can’t seem to command even a second’s worth of screen presence. There are numerous scenes in which she’ll sit down across the table from someone and have a multi-minute conversation—often without any musical score to back it up and often captured in three camera setups or fewer—and the results are deliriously dull to endure. You can practically hear the dead air just floating oppressively between her and anyone she’s talking to, and I can’t understand, for the life of me, how this happened. If nothing else, a Practical Magic sequel should at least offer the simple joy of seeing Bullock and Kidman light up the screen together again. However, if you watch any interview with them from the press tour, there’s literally ten times as much chemistry there as there is in the actual movie.
2. The Plot…?
The screenplay for Practical Magic 2 is credited to a gaggle of different people and seems to have gone through numerous iterations over the years. I am not exaggerating when I say that there were times while watching this movie when I couldn’t help but wonder if I was having a stroke of some kind because there’s so little causality or motivation to this whole movie’s construction.
Characters do things for entirely obfuscated reasons, conversations are made up entirely of non sequiturs, and all of the things the movie’s narration keeps claiming to be about are contradicted by the film itself in baffling ways. Nothing that happens makes even a lick of sense from the word go, and it just gets increasingly nonsensical from there.
Given Bullock’s recent statements about how “AI is the future” and other fucking idiocy like it, I would be lying if I said the thought hadn’t crossed my mind multiple times that this script may very well have utilized AI tools. I hate to say that, but it’s true because there’s so little here that feels creatively organic, authentic, or even human. It’s an approximation of what a movie is supposed to be, but without any substance to it. Awful stuff.
1. Does This Movie Realize What It Is Even Trying to Be About?
Which brings us to the final point: does Practical Magic 2 even realize what it is about or the messages it is conveying? I think the answer is a pretty definitive no. Boiled down to its barest of essentials, Practical Magic 2 is attempting to be a movie about the strength of sisterhood and family ties, even in the face of adversity. And yet, the characters who are the heart of this thematic idea (Bullock’s character’s daughters) spend the bulk of the film separate from one another, with one becoming a main character and the other becoming a glorified extra who isn’t allowed to leave the hospital.
If Practical Magic 2 could said to be dabbling in another theme, it would be the legacy of witches and how the very idea of the supernatural has long been used to scapegoat women, especially more independently-minded ones. And yet, the film’s climactic battle ends with the ostensible heroes of the story burning the antagonist alive at the stake, literally repeating the same sins that set the ‘plot’ of this film into motion centuries earlier.
My point is that Practical Magic 2 is a contradictory viewing experience that can neither walk the walk nor talk the talk. It has no sense of cohesion or consistency to any of the ideas floating around within it, and the result is so deeply disappointing on so many levels.
RGM GRADE
(D-)
Practical Magic 2 is the natural endpoint of legacy sequels as commodification, in that it is nearly entirely devoid of artistic merit or creativity. To be frank, I kind of admire just how desperate a move the final scene of this movie is. After making audiences sit through more than two hours of indecipherable nonsense and “shenanigans,” the movie hits the “break glass in case of emergency” button and pulls every lever in sight, dropping more than a dozen nostalgia-infused, direct callbacks to the original film—all of which have been heavily featured in the marketing—in the hope that audiences might still leave the theater content.
“You got what you wanted, right? You saw your girls do the stuff you wanted to see them do again, right? This wasn’t a waste of time and money. We gave you what you wanted, right?”
It’s not exactly a practical or magical solution to an ostensibly awful movie.
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