NOW IN THEATERS! The Owens sisters are back in Susanne Bier’s Practical Magic 2. Clearly, fans of the first will be excited to see the return of the main cast…sans the dudes. But is this a true sequel that expands the witches’ world, or is it purely fan service to a franchise that was twenty-eight years in the making?
Sally Owens (Sandra Bullock) and her sister Gillian (Nicole Kidman) have spent decades since the first film believing they were forever doomed by their family curse — the one that says any man an Owens woman falls in love with ends up dead. After the death of Sally’s last love, Sally put a hex on her two daughters, Antonia (Maisie Williams) and Kylie (Joey King), so that they would never know they were witches, and made Gillian and the two aunts promise never to reveal their true identities.
It’s amazing the cover-up lasted this long. Everything falls apart when Kylie falls for her boyfriend, Gideon (Xolo Maridueña), and after a sexual encounter, Gideon mistakenly utters the words “I love you.” With the curse not being that strong for Kylie, Gideon only slips into a coma instead of dying. When the girls confront Sally and Aunt Gillian, the family secret comes out, sending Kylie running away from home in hopes of reversing the curse.
Kylie, realizing she’s a super-novice witch, is in no condition to take on the demonic book that holds the curse, so Sally and Gilly chase after her to the Owens family’s ancestral home in England. What Kylie doesn’t realize is that a more sinister force is laying a trap that she is too inexperienced to see. It also doesn’t help that Sally is super rusty on magic after not using it for a long time. She will need the help of a witch expert, Ian (Lee Pace), to get back to full power, though doing so might make her the next target of the family curse.
Gillian Owens (Nicole Kidman) picks flowers with children in a forest clearing in Practical Magic 2.
“Everything falls apart when Kylie falls for her boyfriend, Gideon (Xolo Maridueña), and after a sexual encounter, Gideon mistakenly utters the words “I love you.””
I have to ask: who exactly is the audience for Practical Magic 2? My guess is that it’s solely for fans of the first Practical Magic movie. I haven’t seen the first film, so I’ve had to make a bunch of assumptions about the characters and their motivations, especially about aunts Franny and Jet (Stockard Channing and Dianne Wiest, respectively). The characters are so simplistic that figuring out what’s going on is easy. They’re witches. They cast spells and dispel curses. The spells they cast are convenient to the plot at the moment.
The story is all about these witches accepting who they are in the case of Sally and Gilly, and realizing who they are in the case of Antonia and Kylie. Gosh, this story of identity featuring female leads hadn’t been told since…Supergirl. Seriously, are there no other stories or challenges that women face that aren’t “who am I?”
So simplistic characters and a completely unoriginal story can only lead to cringe performances from the cast. I’m going to guess that director Susanne Bier, realizing what a powerhouse of veteran and new actors she had in her cast, decided to let the actors play with the script and make the dialogue their own. Some actors do this very well, but in Practical Magic 2, the dialogue has a loopy-goop improvised feel… particularly from Sandra Bullock, where we always have to be talking to fill the moments with no dialogue.
There are moments throughout scenes featuring the main cast when everyone talks over one another because that’s how we talk in real life. No…in real life, we talk, stop, and listen to others. There are times when I wish writers didn’t put so much value in their words; this is the exact opposite here. Maybe we should have just stuck to the script because I’m sure what was written was more interesting and to the point than what was said in the film. Look, a director’s job is to direct action and take control of the plot. Not to take a back seat to “the process.” Also, why was Maisie Williams in this movie? She’s relegated to watching her comatose boyfriend and barely has any action going on compared to her co-star.
Practical Magic 2 feels like we lost a lot of the magic from the first and tells a “less than” story in this mediocre follow-up. Sure, I didn’t see the first film, and I’m a dude…but good stories are still good stories; they’re universal, and this ain’t one of them.
"…this story of identity…hadn't been told since…Supergirl."
