The latest decades delayed sequel is Practical Magic 2 turning up 28 years after the original. Nicole Kidman and Sandra Bullock return as sisters Gillian and Sally now accepted by the town locals as witches in a way that Meghan Markle can only dream. Sally’s children Antonia (Maisie Willliams) and Kylie (Joey King) are grown up and in the latter case loved up with her boyfriend telling him one night how much she loves him It’s a fatal mistake because as Gillian and Sally know only too well, ‘Any man who loved an Owen’s woman was marked by tragedy’ and so it comes to be that the boyfriend is hospitalized after a serious accident.
Practical Magic 2 ……
But what Kylie and Antonia have never been made aware of is their heritage. ’We’re witches!’ blurts out Gillian taking her cue from a deleted scene in ‘Keeping up with the Kardashians’. It’s a revelation that a distressed Kylie takes as an opportunity to bring her boyfriend back to health and steals a spell book and hot foots it to the UK where she puts together a concoction of goodness only knows what bound together by her own blood like some satanic recipe for black pudding.
But Gillian and Sally follow her to England hooking up with the only man who can help them locate her daughter, Ian Wright. Not the former Arsenal football player and TV pundit but bedsit booze hound bozo played by Lee Pace whose magical powers and sage advice can help them locate Kylie but soon finds herself in grave danger that drives the story towards climatic Harry Potter–esque hokum.
It’s something of a surprise sequel as the first film fared badly at the box office due to a mish-mash of it being part supernatural spectacle, part rom-com and part police procedural that gave it an uneven tome. The sequel settles for a YA orientated paranormal romance that sees Bullock and Pace also grow romantically close.
Does the film cast a spell over you?
Inevitably for a Hollywood movie the UK is portrayed as only having one city, London, and once they leave to look for Kylie everywhere else is an impossibly quaint village that even the location scout for ‘Midsommer Murders’ would baulk at. And that knowledge of Britain extends to food where Bullock and Pace tuck into a hearty dish of meat and vegetable pie topped off with, of course, custard – the sort of dish that’s yet to appear on Masterchef
Both leads have seemingly never aged but are engaging as the sisters even if their occasional bickering gets a little wearing and there are some nice throwaway quips. Dianne Wiest and Stockard Channing return as the senior witches in the family but are given little to do. Maisie Williams though is wasted as the nurse assigned to stay in the ailing boyfriends ward who presumably had no medical insurance because her care for him extends no further beyond raining sprinkles on him like some half arsed advert promoting the medical qualities for Megan Markle’s ‘As Ever’ brand. At 135 minutes it is overlong but Practical Magic 2 is very much for the fans who made the original film a firm favourite for the Home Entertainment market.
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related feature : ‘Practical Magic’ – 4K UHD
Here’s the trailer…..
