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- Practical Magic 2
- Directed by Susanne Bier
- Comedy, Drama, Fantasy, Romance
- PG-13
- 2h 10m
The best thing about “Practical Magic 2,” to put it bluntly, is that it is precisely what I expected it to be. No more, no less. The 1998 movie — which was a box office bust when released, and has become a cult classic — is not good, properly speaking: tonally floppy, rhythmically janky and somehow, though it’s remembered as a female empowerment movie, weirdly fixated on men. (The men are pretty mediocre, too.)
But I love it, like a lot of women my age, and whenever an autumnal chill creeps into the air I want to make a midnight margarita and watch it again. Now we have a sequel, this one directed by Susanne Bier from a screenplay by Akiva Goldsman (a writer on the first film), Georgia Pritchett and Kelly Marcel. It’s based on Alice Hoffman’s novel “The Book of Magic,” which brings the saga of the Owens curse to a close.
Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman return as the sisters Sally and Gillian Owens. Sally has been widowed for the second time; turns out her feelings for Gary weren’t enough to break the curse dooming any man an Owens woman loves after all. (This is both narratively necessary and also retroactively casts a bit of a pall over the end of “Practical Magic.”) Bereft, she makes Gillian and the aunts promise that they’ll never teach Sally’s daughters who they really are: the heirs to a long line of powerful witches.
Fast forward a little: Those daughters, Kylie (Joey King) and Antonia (Maisie Williams), are in their 20s. They’re on their way home for the birthday of one of the aunts, Bridget (Dianne Wiest), whom everyone has always called Jet, and who still lives with her sister, Frances (Stockard Channing). But Jet has heard the rattle of the death beetle. She knows her time is short. And she is determined to break the Owens curse once and for all.
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