Once upon a time, sequels were avoided, dreaded, or looked upon with skepticism for the fear that they might spoil a great movie. There was reason to doubt the wisdom of making sequels to iconic stand-alone films such as, say, Dirty Harry (1971) or The Godfather (1972) — although, in the case of those two franchises, most of the follow-up films turned out to be worthy of the originals.
These days, however, sequels are scoffed at because they usually just confirm the banality of the first movie. Great movies aren’t getting sequels these days, but plenty of poor ones are — witness 2024’s Twisters to The Devil Wears Prada 2, released this spring. Now comes Practical Magic 2, a sequel to a 1998 movie so remote, so distant, from modern times that nearly any other release from that year, however unremarkable, is likely to induce a greater shock of recognition. The Gwyneth Paltrow version of Great Expectations, anybody? How about Six Days, Seven Nights with Harrison Ford? Or The Avengers — no, not that one, the one with Uma Thurman as Emma Peel? Making a sequel to Practical Magic is no odder than making a sequel to any of those 28-year-old turkeys.
Alas, we are saddled with Practical Magic 2, which resurrects Sandra Bullock as Sally and Nicole Kidman as Gillian, witch siblings who, as before, are deprived of romantic love due to a curse that has persisted for centuries. The sisters apparently share their lavish New England homestead — improbably supported by Sally’s day job as a librarian, of all things — with two aunts from the first flick, Jet (Dianne Wiest) and Franny (Stockard Channing, whose hairstyle resembles that of Susan Sontag). The manse is immaculate except for the periodic emergence of deathwatch beetles (Martha Stewart would not approve) as signifiers of certain demise. It is also entirely free of members of the opposite sex, since, per the movies’ mythology, the curse will bring about the death of any man who considers betrothal to a member of the witchy clan.
Fittingly, Sally has counseled her two daughters against involvement with the opposite sex. Their father, naturally, is six feet under. “This love we have here, this family is all we need,” says Sally, articulating the strictures of the spell, yes, but also expressing the warped contemporary notion that the family one is born into will provide sufficient contentment for a lifetime. The future is female, right? Unsurprisingly, Sally’s now-college-age daughters — Kylie (Joey King) and Antonia (Maisie Williams) — grow up leery of romantic attachments, although, nature taking its course, Kylie becomes close to a completely unmemorable fellow named Gideon (Xolo Mariduena). When Gideon finds himself at death’s door, Sally comes clean about the curse. Strikingly, Kylie absorbs the knowledge that she is kin to a coven with less shock than some might greet such news — a distressing sign of how legacy media, in seemingly innocent movies and TV shows, has worked to acclimate audiences to the occult.
But parents need not worry: What follows is less scandalous than simply stupid. Possessing a book that promises, rather too blatantly, to nullify the curse, Kylie journeys to England, where she is said to have gone “missing” — even though her mother is able to locate her whereabouts thanks to her use of a credit card. But the “search” for Kylie provides the pretext for Bullock and Kidman to clomp around various Harry Potter-like sets with clunky luggage and increasingly strained one-liners. “You’re a sentient cucumber with attitude,” Gillian tells Sally at one point. Whatever. The spells used by the witches here have the approximate literary quality of a poem by Amanda Gorman, although, in their defense, they have better rhymes than much of Gorman’s work: “Protect our own / Blood to blood / And bone to bone.” At times, the London scenes seem to exist for no other reason than for our heroines to indulge in British comfort food, such as shepherd’s pie with a side of custard.
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To be fair, the moviemakers do evince sufficient belief in traditional romantic love for Kylie to prevail in her efforts to restore health to Gideon, and for Sally to end up in the arms of a bearded occultist named Ian (Lee Pace). Yet the fact that the film ratifies marriage does not altogether cancel out its sickly sweet feminist sentimentality. “No magic is stronger than sisterhood,” Franny insists. An eleventh-hour plot twist even seems to endorse, in the guise of spells and witchy stoicism, suicide.
This is a sad occasion for all concerned. That neither Bullock nor Kidman act as though 28 years have passed since their original witch’s brew says more about their acting generation’s refusal to transition to age-appropriate parts than anything else. King and Williams, as their grown children, barely register, and as for the talented Dianne Wiest: She should go back to work with Woody Allen, the director whose films won her two Oscars, rather than subject herself to the humiliation of appearing in this silly nonsense. There’s a “sequel” I could get behind. I hear Woody is casting a new movie in Madrid…
Peter Tonguette is the Life & Arts editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.