Practical Magic 2 - Movie Review

I watched the original Practical Magic for the first time a couple of days before seeing the sequel. In 1998, I was not exactly choosing between Sandra Bullock and Nicolas Cage in Con Air. That would have been a difficult decision for teenage me. It was not difficult.

Still, I understand why the first movie became a cult favorite. It is a charming romantic comedy about two sisters, Sally and Gillian Owens, played by Bullock and Kidman. Their family is cursed: any man an Owens woman truly loves eventually dies. Sally accepts that she will live alone. Gillian accepts it too, in the sense that she continues doing the exact opposite of that.

The first movie has a simple hook, a warm sisterly relationship, some goofy comedy, and a magical ’90s atmosphere. It is not a masterpiece, but it knows what kind of movie it is.

Practical Magic 2 does not seem to know.

Too Much Movie, Not Enough Story

The daughters are now grown up, played by Joey King and Maisie Williams. King’s character falls in love with Miguel from Cobra Kai and Blue Beetle, which is how I will be referring to him because apparently that is his permanent identity now.

The speedrun backstory is that Sally erased her daughters’ memories of magic. This was meant to protect them from the family curse, because nothing says “healthy parenting” like magically deleting your children’s understanding of their own family.

Now one daughter falls in love, the curse becomes a problem again, her boyfriend ends up in a coma, and Sally and Gillian have to track her down while everyone gets dragged into a scavenger hunt involving magic, family history, and conveniently placed strangers.

There is a lot happening. The problem is that none of it feels connected.

This movie feels like several different scripts were sitting in a studio office for twenty years. Someone finally walked in and said, “Why choose?” So they stitched the scripts together, added another forty minutes, and sent the result to theaters.

That is not necessarily what happened. It is exactly what the movie feels like.

The Charm Is Gone

Bullock and Kidman still have chemistry. That part works. When the two of them are onscreen together, you can see the original movie trying to claw its way back into the room.

But the first Practical Magic was a magical romantic comedy. The sequel remembers the magic and the romance, then seems to lose the comedy somewhere on the way to Europe.

The jokes rarely land. The situations are not especially funny. Even the supernatural elements are mostly CGI mist floating around while the characters explain what the mist means.

It has all the magic and none of the charm.

There is your bumper sticker.

The original film had a cozy, slightly strange personality. The new one has plot mechanics. Characters run into people because the story needs them to. A clue appears because the next sequence requires a clue. Someone knows exactly the thing everyone else needs to know, right when they need to know it.

That kind of convenience can work in a breezy fantasy movie. Here, it makes the whole thing feel assembled instead of written.

The Timeline Is a Problem

This is where I entered full nitpick territory, but the movie invited me in.

The original came out in 1998. The sequel arrives in 2026, nearly thirty years later. The daughters in the first film were around ten or eleven. Joey King and Maisie Williams are both in their late twenties, but King’s character appears to be in college, which makes her seem closer to her early twenties.

So how much time has actually passed?

There is a phone in the trailer that looks like an iPhone 7, which would place the story somewhere around 2016 or 2017. That would make the sequel about twenty years after the original, not thirty. But if the movie takes place in 2026, then the daughters are apparently meant to be much older than they look.

Maybe the first movie secretly took place in the 2000s. Maybe the daughters are supposed to be forty. Maybe the timeline was put in a locked drawer and nobody was allowed to ask questions.

Normally, I can forgive this sort of thing. Here, it matters because the movie wants me to understand how mature these characters are. Bullock and Kidman’s characters seem to have barely changed, even though potentially decades have passed. Is Gillian supposed to be around forty, or is she spiritually Blanche Devereaux from The Golden Girls?

I love Blanche. I just need to know how old everyone is supposed to be before I judge their decisions.

Legacy Sequel Syndrome

This is the biggest issue with Practical Magic 2. It feels like a sequel that arrived about twenty years too late.

Legacy sequels can work when the years have done something to the characters. They can be older, wiser, damaged, divorced, estranged, or simply forced to confront the consequences of their earlier choices.

Here, the original characters feel frozen in place while the plot throws new problems at them. The movie wants the emotional credit of thirty years passing without doing much with those thirty years.

The social conversation around the film also raises complaints about casting, recasting, and queer representation that feels more like an afterthought than part of the story. Those issues feed the same larger problem: the sequel seems aware of what audiences expect from the Practical Magic brand, but less interested in building a clean story around those expectations.

That leaves the movie leaning heavily on nostalgia. Bullock and Kidman are back. The name is back. The magic is back. The reason to care is harder to find.

Final Take

Practical Magic 2 is not completely without appeal. Bullock and Kidman remain watchable, and fans of the original may enjoy seeing them together again.

But the film is overlong, disjointed, and strangely humorless. It runs about twenty-five minutes longer than the first movie and feels twice as long because every subplot keeps wandering into another subplot.

You get pulled into a European scavenger hunt that barely feels related to the opening act. By the time the movie reaches its conclusion, I was less interested in breaking the curse than breaking free.

If your girlfriend wants to see this, you have been warned. The first Practical Magic was a cute compromise. Taking someone to Practical Magic 2 may be how you end up single.

Verdict: Skip it unless you are a committed fan of the original.

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