Practical Magic 2 Review feedzy_import_tag

Practical Magic 2 is in theaters on September 11.

In 1998, director Griffin Dunne, along with Bullock and Kidman, delivered the equivalent of a warm autumnal Wiccan hug of a movie with Practical Magic. A modest hit at the box office, its power grew over the years as a cult favorite because of the luminous charm of the two leads as love-lorn, cursed witch sisters Sally and Gillian Owens.

Twenty-eight years later, it’s actually a little bit of Hollywood magic that Practical Magic 2 even got made with the returning cast of Bullock, Kidman, Stockard Channing, and Dianne Wiest as the matriarchs of the Owens family, all still residing together in their family home in Massachusetts. As beguiling as it is to see the return of these actresses, their alchemy is impeded by a hyperactive screenplay that’s too busy bouncing them through plot beats and muddled stakes instead of giving them, and the new cast, better stories.

Practical Magic 2 adapts from author Alice Hoffman’s novel series about the Owens clan of witches, this time primarily drawing from 2021’s The Book of Magic. It’s about 20-ish years since the end of the first film, which had the Owens witches “outing” themselves on Halloween to their little town, publicly embracing their Wiccan legacy.

Today, Bullock’s Sally is the town librarian and dedicated single mother to grown daughters Kylie (Joey King) and neurosurgeon-in-training Antonia (Maisie Williams). Because of the still intact 300-year-old Owens curse that brings death to any man to whom they confess their love, Sally has kept her girls in the dark about their magical abilities. She’s made her still free-spirited yet vaguely employed sister Gilly (Kidman) promise not to tell them, along with the reluctant buy-in of their aunts, Jet (Weist) and Franny (Channing).

But time and curses can only be held at bay for so long, and Kylie’s serious relationship with earnest Gideon (Xolo Maridueña) and the chirping of a deathwatch beetle means heartbreak and a lot of secrets are going to spill at the same time. The intersection of a curse-induced accident and Jet finding a long-hidden tome, The Book of the Raven (written by their ancestor and curse creator Maria Owens), prompts a dramatic breach in the family. A livid Kylie lays out her mother for hiding their magical abilities all their lives, and proceeds to impulsively listen to a beckoning voice compelling her to England, where it promises a way to save Gideon’s life. A road trip ensues with a panicked Sally engaging Gillian to follow, while looking up a UK expert, Dr. Ian Wright (Lee Pace), for help in unlocking the secrets of the Owens book and the history of Maria’s birthplace.

In theory, it’s not a bad idea to shake up the single locale dynamics of the first movie and dig into the family history. However, the screenplay by Akiva Goldsman, Georgia Pritchett and Kelly Marcel sacrifices the insular charm and Wiccan history of the Massachusetts community for an odd-couple travel comedy featuring the still oil-and-water sisters. Sally has been, and remains for the majority of this film, in emotional stasis, too broken and closed down from repeated losses. Thankfully, Bullock still knows how to make an audience feel the pain of her character. But there’s also a strong sense that the script is wasting the broader talents of what Bullock could have brought to her character rather than give her a one-note trajectory that you see coming a mile away.

Kidman does her impish best to play Gillian as the devil on Sally’s shoulder, trying to break those tall emotional walls while pushing her towards the very handsome and multi-tattooed Dr. Wright. But outside of playing her frustrated sister’s keeper, the script shorts the actress any parallel meaty story like she had with the murder of Gilly’s truly frightening ex-boyfriend Jimmy (Goran Visnjic) in the first film. When Bullock and Kidman get some rare quiet moments to just let the sisters talk, they make the most of it every time. But those moments are few and far between the more the chase for Kylie picks up and gets burdened with an overly convoluted exposition dump about the ancient history of the area where Maria was burned to death, and who or what has been summoning Kylie.

As for Pace, I’ll never understand how an actor as charming and compelling as he is gets handed such underwhelming material. If you can’t write a character for the man that is clearly swoon-worthy from the get-go, you’re doing something incredibly wrong. In fact, it’s a little insulting that Wright is introduced in a stunt set piece that frames him purely as eye candy, with little clarity of purpose aside from playing a potential love interest. And even then, the script gives Bullock and Pace scenes with so much tonal whiplash it’s never clear if they’re actually flirting, or just being passive-aggressive with one another. The heat and charm found between Sally and Aidan Quinn’s Detective Gary Hallet in the first film is sorely missing between Sally and Wright no matter how hard the actors try, and that’s a big problem in getting the audience to buy the power of love.

The film’s other cardinal sin is separating the main cast, with Bullock, Kidman, Pace and King essentially in their own mini chase movie in picturesque, tax-incentivized England. Director Susanne Bier doesn’t frame the locations or set pieces with much scale or even the fairy-tale charm that Dunne shot the first film with, so the sequel lacks the mood and menace that gave the original such memorable vibes. Meanwhile, Channing, Williams and Maridueña are stuck back home in what feels like a single-room loaner hospital set from a soap opera. In particular, Williams is done dirty, given nothing of note to do, which is a travesty. Ageism also looms with Weist and Channing, who are relegated to cliché fates that work as well as they do only because of both women’s immense talent for wringing the most out of any scene they appear in.