There is a version of Practical Magic 2 that runs a punchy 105 minutes and mostly lets Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman drink, bitch, cast questionable spells, and roast each other from opposite bunkers across the kitchen island. That movie absolutely smokes this year’s crop of over-pumpkin-spiced Halloween fare and sends you out into the crisp night air ready to serve up a few tricks of your own.
Unfortunately, that version appears to have been cursed by the same school of dark magic that spent the last 20 years convincing us the first Practical Magic wasn’t practically fucking terrible.
With nearly three decades of mis-remembered hype accumulated under its hat, the franchise gives us the customer-is-always-right sequel.
The setup is familiar, now with a new generation tasked with discovering the less glamorous realities of modern witching. Sally Owens (Bullock)—traumatized by the loss of Gary via the ol' family screw job—has spent years keeping her daughters Kylie (Joey King) and Antonia (Maisie Williams) away from magic. The parenting approach of “we’ll simply never tell the kids the enormous family secret” works about as well as you’d expect in a movie whose audience showed up specifically to watch them discover the enormous family secret.
One of the daughters obviously learns the truth after I guess the screenwriters decided she’d be the one to break the seal. So the Owens women et al head to England in search of answers and, let's be real, a tax credit.
No question Bullock and Kidman can still bring it to some extent. Kidman definitely understands exactly what kind of movie this should be: a little campy, a little horny, and never more than five minutes from somebody making a bad decision near a full bar.
The bigger problem is that we’re never quite sure what connects all these people besides being cast as relatives and a magical paycheck. The movie has a lot of shit going on and nothing gluing it together. A whole bucket of nostalgia was obviously pre-loaded into the system memory. That magic book, the whole romance-can't-work backstory of the family curse, and a family-wide, consistent drink order are all out to play. Yet after a quarter century to perfect the magic show, the whole thing still feels like amateur hour witching.
Maisie Williams gets rill hosed. You can cast Arya Stark in a witch movie and give her character the line reading workload of “mildly concerned thanksgiving guest number four” all you want, but the audience is still going to spend two hours waiting for her to flip on the margarita machine, the darkness, and go full Carrie. She never does.
And yeah, the midnight margaritas still return. I’m not denying there isn’t that nugget of truth in advertising. Warner Bros. understands branding even when the screenplay forgets storytelling. Maybe it doesn’t matter. If audiences turn the whole thing into a two-hour drinking game, the structural problems might self-limit.
The original worked because it was an adorable mess. It bounced between romance, comedy, domestic drama, and supernatural nonsense like somebody dumped four movies into a blender with the margaritas. The sequel is more professionally assembled and less alive—not entirely unlike the adult lives of the people who grew up loving the original.
It reinserts the ingredients without recreating the feeling. What remains is mostly the hangover.
In the end Practical Magic 2 is not a disaster. (Exuberant confidence in the quality, eh?)
Fans heading out with costumes and making an event of the thing will get enough to justify the trip. Everyone else—particularly anyone paying for a babysitter—can wait for streaming, make a margarita at home, and enjoy the remaining pumpkin spice of middle age without surge pricing.
Sometimes the magic works. Sometimes you just own the IP.
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