Practical Magic 2 is better than its first movie. A sequel superior to the original after 28 years is certainly not something you can take for granted, because some sequels made decades later are absolute travesties. This one had an advantage, though. It had a solid source book to work from, and it seems to have followed that book much more closely. The first Practical Magic treated its source novel more like an outline than an explicit source, which turns out to be important because some of the things that seem like continuity problems in this movie really originated with changes made by the first one.
I recently rewatched the original Practical Magic specifically to make sure I was ready for this movie, and just days after watching it, I literally forgot nearly everything I had just watched. While it’s a charming movie, it’s not terribly memorable. I actually had to look up bullet points from it just to make sure I knew what was going on.
One thing I did not know going into Practical Magic 2 is that this isn’t simply Hollywood resurrecting a 28-year-old movie. Both movies are based on books by Alice Hoffman. The original Practical Magic was based on her 1995 novel, and Hoffman eventually wrote four books about the Owens family. Books two and three are prequels, while the fourth, The Book of Magic, continues the story and is what this movie is based on. So going directly from books one to four for the two contemporary movies actually makes a surprising amount of sense.
I have not read these books, so let me make that perfectly clear. I’m relying on summaries of them, not pretending I know the source material firsthand. But from those summaries, the books themselves seem to flow pretty logically. The first book does not definitively say that the Owens family curse has been broken, while the fourth deals with finally breaking it. The first movie is where the problem came in because it gave us more of a Hollywood ending where the curse was apparently over. So Practical Magic 2 has to walk that back to get itself onto the storyline of the fourth book. That makes considerably more sense to me than sequel writers simply deciding, “Nope, the curse is back.”
All the original witches are here: Sandra Bullock as Sally, Nicole Kidman as Gillian, Dianne Wiest as Jet and Stockard Channing as Franny. Obviously they had to use different actresses for Sally’s little girls because they’re not little girls anymore. Kylie is now played by Joey King and Antonia by Maisie Williams, and if the two daughters aren’t exactly clones of Sally and Gillian, they’re certainly their spiritual successors. One has the dark hair, one has the red hair, and you can pretty much see what they’re doing.
Not long after the first movie, Sally’s new husband Gary—the man she had basically made impossible to find when she was a little girl—dies, and Sally swears off magic. We know it happens fairly soon afterward because the flashback still shows Kylie and Antonia as little girls. Sally casts a spell that not only prevents her from using magic herself, but also seems intended to suppress her daughters’ memories of the magic they have already seen. They’re standing right there while she’s doing the spell, and they’re certainly old enough to remember what has been happening around them. So Sally isn’t merely refusing to tell her daughters about their magic and the family curse; she is actively trying to erase magic from their lives. The spell is effective in one sense, because the girls grow up without knowing what they are, but ultimately it doesn’t work. Magic—and the curse—finds them anyway.
Kylie has a boyfriend, Gideon, and she has trouble telling him that she loves him. This isn’t because she knows anything about the Owens curse, because Sally has made sure she doesn’t. Kylie finally does tell Gideon she loves him and, almost immediately, just like Sally’s first husband in the first movie, he gets hit by a car. He doesn’t die, but he does end up in a coma, and there’s your inciting incident. Kylie has just discovered in probably the worst possible way that the family history her mother has been hiding from her is very real.
There is an entirely poorly written aspect involving a promise that was made and is then explicitly broken, followed by a child saying she’ll never trust her mother again. It becomes a whole thing, and I think it could have been much better written. The actresses manage to carry it off, but they’re doing more work than the writing is at that point.
Kylie now has to rescue Gideon while simultaneously discovering that she is a witch. She finds a book that essentially has the magical equivalent of a chapter titled “How to Remove the Curse,” and that sends her off to England trying to find some way to break it and save him, even though she has no real idea what she is going to find once she gets there. Tom Lockland is also manipulating her from afar, magically, and this is where the movie loses me a little bit. This guy wants to steal Kylie’s magic because he doesn’t have magic, but he is somehow using magic to manipulate her into coming to him so he can steal the magic he doesn’t have. I don’t know how that works. The movie pretty much waves its hands at that one, and you just have to go with it.
There is a little hand-waving around the money involved, too. Kylie is a college student who can apparently afford to suddenly fly to England, and then everybody else starts following her over there. Sally runs a library. I don’t really know librarians to be that rich, but okay. Maybe there’s some generational Owens wealth they just don’t proclaim. I’ve never been one of those people who can just decide, “My life sucks. I’m going to Europe,” so maybe spontaneous international travel is cheaper and easier than I think it is.
The more I thought about this story, though, the more I realized that Tom isn’t really the bad guy who interests me. He’s the conventional bad guy, but the real bad guy in this entire story—in fact, I’m going to argue the real bad guy in both movies—is Maria Owens. Maria is the ancestor who got her heart broken and cast a spell so that she would never suffer from love again, and that spell became the Owens family curse.
Think about what that actually did to this family. Sally loses two loves of her life, then closes herself off from magic, closes herself off from her daughters and even closes herself off from Gillian. The relationship between those sisters was practically the heart of the first movie, and now Sally has pushed Gillian away along with everything else connected to magic. Gillian goes almost completely in the other direction. She has become the person who only loves them and leaves them. She pretends she has this wonderfully full life, but it’s actually a pretty empty one because she never stays around long enough to really love anybody.
The movie never explicitly addresses that, but it does something much more interesting with Kylie, who is essentially Gillian’s analog in the next generation. Kylie actually gets advice on how to love without really loving, basically how to have the relationship without making herself vulnerable to the curse, and she completely rejects it. She truly loves Gideon, says so, and then goes through all of this because she refuses to accept that loving somebody means eventually having to run away from them.
So generations of Owens women have spent their lives either hiding from love, running away from it, pushing away the people they love or watching those people die, all because one ancestor got her heart broken and decided to solve the problem magically. Maria Owens started this whole mess. Tom may be the guy doing conventionally bad-guy things in this particular movie, but Maria has been screwing over this family for generations.
There is also Ian Wright, who gets to play the part of “Is he a bad guy or is he not a bad guy?” and I think that is handled quite well, although he is considerably more forgiving than I would be. Belladonna gets used again, and this time Gillian evidently gets the dose right because he doesn’t die. If Ian knows these sisters as well as he is supposed to, I would expect at least a little lingering resentment over the fact that they just tried to kill him, but he pretty much lets that go.
And while I’m complaining about things that have very little to do with whether this is a good movie, I’m going to argue against women wearing combat boots. It’s just not an attractive look, and you cannot argue that they’re comfortable because I wore combat boots for roughly a decade of my life and can tell you with no reservation that they’re not comfortable. They’re utilitarian and they’re fine, but if you want to walk a dozen miles in them, you’re going to have blisters. So a girl wearing combat boots because they’re supposedly comfortable does not make logical sense to me. They look ugly. They are ugly. Get over it.
All that being said about Maria, the more conventional bad guy is dealt with and the curse is finally ended in a very satisfying yet heart-wrenching way. Yeah, that’s a spoiler, but you know it’s going to end well. I’m not telling you how, and the how is the important part.
That’s also probably the biggest difference between Practical Magic and Practical Magic 2: this one made me actually care about the characters. I had watched the original only days earlier and had already forgotten huge pieces of it. This movie has better characterization, a stronger plot and a better-organized story, and even when it gets a little hand-wavy about its magical logic, it works. Maybe following The Book of Magic more closely gave the filmmakers a stronger foundation to build on. Whatever the reason, Practical Magic 2 is simply a better movie than Practical Magic, and I’m giving it 3½ out of 5 stars.
★★★½ out of ★★★★★