Practical Magic 2
The plot of the original Practical Magic (1998) is jam-packed with plot elements: an ancient curse, romantic attachments, untimely deaths, a zombie, a serial killer investigation — plus all that titular magic. Practical Magic 2, though nearly a half-hour longer, is more bare bones. Three generations of the Owens family women work once again to counter the same curse central to the first movie: Men who love Owens women are fated to die early. At least Sally Owens (Sandra Bullock) got a few years with her cursed husband, long enough to produce a couple of daughters. When older daughter Kylie (Joey King) falls in love with Gideon (Xolo Maridueña), he’s hit by a car and left lingering in a coma the day after she first says, “I love you.”
The rest of the film follows Kylie to England, on a quest to reverse the curse, with her mom and her Aunt Gillian (Nicole Kidman) right behind her. There they meet a professor of the dark arts, Ian (Lee Pace), who’s got a magical enemy of his own.
The packed audience of mostly women with whom I saw the movie on its first night in theaters seemed thrilled with Practical Magic 2. I overheard one woman breathlessly telling her friends as they left that she started crying in the first five minutes and never stopped. An unscientific observation of the rest of the departing viewers — mostly smiling and energized — suggested that sentiment was shared, to some degree, by much of the audience.
I was not immune to the movie’s charms. It was great to see Dianne Wiest and Stockard Channing return as Aunt Jet and Aunt Frances, and Pace (best known as the Elven King in The Hobbit trilogy, despite having been born in Oklahoma) has a laid-back charisma here that balances well with Bullock’s high-strung Sally. Kidman, as Gillian, seems more to be having a lark than actually acting, but King (so good in Hulu’s The Princess and We Were the Lucky Ones) is fully committed to her role, and gives some emotional weight to the absurdities of the screenplay (by Akiva Goldsman, a writer on the first film, with Georgia Pritchett and Kelly Marcel).
Danish director Susanne Bier — an Oscar winner for Best Foreign Language Film In a Better World (2010) — has taken over for original director Griffin Dunne and gives all the female leads room to expand on their characters’ designated traits: irresponsibility (Kidman), insecurity (Bullock), whimsy (Weist), wisdom (Channing), and determination (King). Most important, Bier recognizes that the appeal of this mini franchise is sisterhood, so the many scenes of bickering and bonding sibling pairs all lead to a climax that turns sisterhood into a powerful weapon.
For my part, as a man with no sister pairs in any recent or subsequent generation of my family, I found the film tonally inconsistent — largely unfunny as a comedy and unconvincing as a drama — as well as overlong. But I was buoyed somewhat by the affection pouring out around me in the theater, so I found the several stacked concluding scenes satisfying enough.
Like the first movie, this one is an adaptation of a novel by Alice Hoffman, a prolific writer whose 1995 novel, Practical Magic, has been by far her most successful. From 2017 to 2021, she produced two prequels and one sequel to that bestseller (the sequel is the basis of this movie). This year, she released The Witches of Cambridge, the publisher of which promises it will launch a “brand-new series.” Hoffman is nothing if not… practical. Perhaps more magic will follow.
Grade: C. Rated PG-13. Now playing at AMC River Hills 10, Carolina Cinemark, and Regal Biltmore Grande.
(Photo: Warner Bros.)
