This Practical Magic 2 review is going to put me in the minority in my own living room, because my wife and daughter walked out of the theater on a completely different wavelength than I did. This was a girlie movie through and through, and they loved it on those terms. I went in with an open mind and came out thinking it just wasn’t a great movie, and I can’t talk myself out of that even accounting for the fact that I was never really the target audience to begin with.
Sandra Bullock’s Face Isn’t Doing the Work Anymore
The acting is subpar pretty much across the board, and a lot of that traces back to Bullock. She’s never been the strongest actress technically, but she’s always been fun, genuinely funny, with that wry, game-for-anything energy that made her the closest thing America had to a sweetheart for a couple of decades. Watch her in Demolition Man or Miss Congeniality and that energy is right there on her face doing half the work. In this one it just isn’t. Her face doesn’t seem able to make the motions the scenes need, and it costs her in exactly the moments where the movie needs her most. Her daughter’s boyfriend gets hit by a car and what we get is something close to crocodile tears. Her daughter tells her she never wants to speak to her again and Bullock’s expression barely shifts. She meets the new love of her life and even that doesn’t really land on her face the way it should.
It’s a real shame, because I don’t think this is a writing problem so much as a physical one, and it’s the kind of thing that’s genuinely sad to watch happen to someone. If she keeps going the way she’s going with whatever beauty regime she’s on, I don’t see this getting better in whatever comes next. Compare that to Meryl Streep, who’s never been afraid to let her face show her age or carry her scenes, and the movies she’s in are better for it. A Practical Magic 2 review I read afterward made basically the same point about her and Kidman hitting the same beats they hit the first time, like nothing about the sisters has moved on in the years since the original – and once you notice it, you can’t stop noticing it.
The Supporting Cast Doesn’t Help Either
Now let’s talk casting, because there’s a coincidence here so obvious that any Doctor Who fan is going to be pointing at the screen. Maisie Williams plays a doctor, and there’s a British call box involved, and I refuse to believe nobody in that casting room noticed what they were doing. It gets her into the hospital room with the boyfriend in a coma, I suppose, except family would have been let in regardless, so the whole detour felt unnecessary. Worse, when one of the great aunts starts throwing salt around the room like she’s exorcising the place, a doctor is exactly the person you’d expect to react. Instead: nothing. Crickets. That was the one moment built for her character to actually do something and the movie just lets it pass.
Then there’s Lee Pace as the love interest, which you can see coming before the plane even takes off. My daughter kept calling him the Elven king from The Hobbit, I kept picturing him as the emperor from Foundation, and honestly neither of us could get past that and into whoever he was supposed to be playing here. He magically frees Bullock from the grief-block she’s put on herself since her husband died, and there’s no real sense of how that happens. Just some hand-holding and a bit of a glow. It’s exactly the kind of moment where you could actually show or explain the magic doing something, and instead the movie waves at it and moves on.
That hospital sequence is really where the whole supporting cast problem shows up at once. You’ve got Williams playing concerned professional, a coma patient who exists purely as a plot device to keep the daughter in town, and family standing around a bed doing the kind of stiff, blocking-heavy acting that makes a scene feel like it’s being performed rather than lived. None of it is bad enough to be memorable in the wrong way, it’s just flat, and flat is worse than bad because there’s nothing to actually talk about afterward except how little it did for you.
The Curse Was Always Going to Be the Weak Link
Credit where it’s due: this isn’t just a rehash of the first film, which counts for something. Devil Wears Prada 2 felt like the same story in different clothes (hah, didn’t see that coming did you!) and this one at least tries to tell something new. But it’s still built on the same underlying device as the original: the curse. We open on it, with Bullock burying her husband, implied to be dead because of it, and no real sense of how long they’d even been married before it happened – although you’d assume its fairly soon after the close of the original movie based on the ages of the girls. We close on it too, finally broken when one of the aunts gives up her life for it – except she was already dying, so it’s less a sacrifice than dying a bit early. That’s a cop-out, and I don’t think the ending earns it.
The villain doesn’t help matters. Some guy named Tom, obviously the bad guy from his first scene, and for the flimsiest reasons imaginable. My wife was laughing at his monologuing, and not because it was working. The whole thing plays like a retread of the signposts that made the first movie work, without fixing any of what didn’t, and that’s about the shape of it. The jokes are there, scattered through the runtime trying to lighten a movie that’s otherwise pretty miserable and angry for its entire length, and they mostly don’t land either.
Bullock plays this one angry and sad from start to finish, and I get why, given what the story does to her character, but it makes for a long sit when the lightness never really breaks through. A story about sisters and magic and a curse should have room to breathe and have fun with itself the way the original did, at least some of the time. This one holds the mood so tightly that even the moments clearly written as comic relief come out heavy, like the cast never got permission to actually enjoy any of it.
I can’t call this a great movie, and going in open-minded didn’t change that by the end. Not my favorite outing for this franchise, and I’m landing on a 2 out of 5.
