Practical Magic 2 Review
Entirely un-magical. This one was a drag.
Sally (Sandra Bullock) vowed to no longer use her magic, and to hide their true nature from her daughters Antonia (Maisie Williams) and Kylie (Joey King); even making Gillian (Nicole Kidman) promise to do so. But when Aunt Bridget (Dianne West) dies, and Kylie’s boyfriend falls into a coma after an accident, Kylie discovers she is a witch and the nature of the family curse. Intent on breaking it and being allowed to love, and returning her boyfriend to her, Kylie flies to London with a left handed magic book. Gilly and Sally follow, teaming up with British professor Ian Wright (Lee Pace) to track her down.
Practical Magic 2 just never hits its stride.
Between banter that just doesn’t land, a couple of phoned in performances, and a linear plot that just feels completely undercooked and overstuffed at the same time, it is the sort of movie that just drags on and on in the cinema.
Bullock feels like she is sleepwalking through this one. There are brief flashes of banter, dry asides about her sister’s dating history that work and play to her strengths, but for the rest of the film she is left to play the scared, barely there mother figure. Kidman has a few bright spark moments, but the continued back and forth between the sisters has none of the charm of the first film, and just grates. Not to mention whatever was going on in the sound mix, where when they are talking over each other you can barely understand it.
The daughters are fine. Williams is almost entirely sidelined as a character whose one descriptor in the script was obviously ‘Doctor’. King does well with some of the more intense dramatic scenes, but her character choices are nonsense. And Lee Pace is always a fave, but in this the dialogue he is given to work with is absolute garbage, as they try and shoehorn in a romance plot that makes no sense, while also feeling completely unearned.
And that speaks to the real problems with this movie; the plot. There are so many threads here that could have worked as a good, or at least better, film. The daughters discovering they are witches, and resenting their mother. The sisters reuniting and Gilly bringing Sally back to her power. A tale of sisterly love and its bonds, or how the curse affected Sally and Gilly’s relationships in different ways.
Instead, we’re given a story where Kylie’s boyfriend has an accident and falls into a coma. Kylie immediately learns she is a witch - a twist that doesn’t REMOTELY faze her. Then loses it at her mother, and having done no magic ever in her life, and having no idea what magic is or really what the curse entails, snatches a book she glimpsed once on a desk, and flies to London for some inexplicable reason. What is her plan? How does she know any of this could work? It’s ridiculous. She shrugs off the only two people who could help her, and they have to chase her across the world - only to be aided by some random male witch who strikes up a deep, loving romance with Sally IN 72 HOURS!!!
Christ, even writing it out seems wild.
At the end of the day, the film can feel as lacklustre, strangely lit and poorly performed as you’d like. The real curse is that this movie runs for 2 hours and 10 minutes, and you feel every beating second of it.
