Screenshot 2026-09-20 213913.png
Here we have a movie that a lot of people have been delighted with, but a few months ago nobody had a clue it even existed. It's one of those sequels nobody was asking for. It's as if the fine folks at Warner Bros. were looking down a list of their movies, trolling for something to remake or sequelize, and landed on 1998's moderate hit, Practical Magic, and said "Hey! Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman still look good and aren't surrounded by scandals, let's make a sequel to this!"
You don't need to have seen the first one to understand (for the most part) the second. The story concerns two sisters who happen to be witches, and are affected by this curse, in which anyone who they fall in love with will suddenly experience an untimely death. Unfortunately their witchly powers don't extend to preventing this, so they just have to live with it. Sandra Bullock's character has two daughters, and her solution to this dilemma is to cast a spell on them to make them not realize or remember that they're witches, which is kind of hard to explain when various magic effects start issuing from them. Eventually, of course, one of them falls in love, but as soon as the dreaded "L" word is spoken, the boyfriend is hit by a car, putting him into a coma. So the untimely death is not necessarily sudden, after all.
Sandra's daughter discovers a book that has a chapter called "How to Break The Curse" but, those pages are magically sealed shut for some reason that I'm not sure is ever made clear. She is somehow called to England to find the solution to opening the sealed pages, but this leads to the inevitable situation that arises in all movies involving magic: She gets involved with "powers she can't control," not unlike Elsa in Frozen, except without the ice and snow.
So Sandra and Nicole have to hurry to London to rescue her from said powers, and in so doing, the pages are somehow unsealed (I forget how, or maybe I fell asleep), they break the curse, the boyfriend survives, he and Sandra's daughter get married, and all is right with the world, at least until it's time another sequel, probably in 2054. Hopefully Sandra and Nicole can be de-aged for that one.
I have never seen the first movie, so I wasn't sure what to expect from this one, but I was disappointed there weren't more cool magical scenes -- people disappearing, things floating, things appearing hilariously out of nowhere, etc. I probably saw one too many episodes of the TV show Bewitched as a kid, which may have affected my expectations. There also seem to be a lot of marginal characters in this movie that weren't all that vital to the story. Maybe if I saw it again some of them might seem more vital, I don't know.
It wasn't horrible, and Sandra and Nicole did a nice job. (I noticed that this movie follows the usual Sandra Bullock movie protocol, under which her hair starts out looking nice and gets progressively disheveled the more the movie goes on, until it looks like an old mop on her head, only to look nice again during the ending.) The other actors -- Stockard Channing in particular -- do their roles justice, but overall the movie was untimately pretty forgettable in my book. 2 out of 5 stars from me.
The women in the audience are loving it for the most part, so I guess my rating comes from me not exactly being the target audience.
Here we have a movie that a lot of people have been delighted with, but a few months ago nobody had a clue it even existed. It's one of those sequels nobody was asking for. It's as if the fine folks at Warner Bros. were looking down a list of their movies, trolling for something to remake or sequelize, and landed on 1998's moderate hit, Practical Magic, and said "Hey! Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman still look good and aren't surrounded by scandals, let's make a sequel to this!"
You don't need to have seen the first one to understand (for the most part) the second. The story concerns two sisters who happen to be witches, and are affected by this curse, in which anyone who they fall in love with will suddenly experience an untimely death. Unfortunately their witchly powers don't extend to preventing this, so they just have to live with it. Sandra Bullock's character has two daughters, and her solution to this dilemma is to cast a spell on them to make them not realize or remember that they're witches, which is kind of hard to explain when various magic effects start issuing from them. Eventually, of course, one of them falls in love, but as soon as the dreaded "L" word is spoken, the boyfriend is hit by a car, putting him into a coma. So the untimely death is not necessarily sudden, after all.
Sandra's daughter discovers a book that has a chapter called "How to Break The Curse" but, those pages are magically sealed shut for some reason that I'm not sure is ever made clear. She is somehow called to England to find the solution to opening the sealed pages, but this leads to the inevitable situation that arises in all movies involving magic: She gets involved with "powers she can't control," not unlike Elsa in Frozen, except without the ice and snow.
So Sandra and Nicole have to hurry to London to rescue her from said powers, and in so doing, the pages are somehow unsealed (I forget how, or maybe I fell asleep), they break the curse, the boyfriend survives, he and Sandra's daughter get married, and all is right with the world, at least until it's time another sequel, probably in 2054. Hopefully Sandra and Nicole can be de-aged for that one.
I have never seen the first movie, so I wasn't sure what to expect from this one, but I was disappointed there weren't more cool magical scenes -- people disappearing, things floating, things appearing hilariously out of nowhere, etc. I probably saw one too many episodes of the TV show Bewitched as a kid, which may have affected my expectations. There also seem to be a lot of marginal characters in this movie that weren't all that vital to the story. Maybe if I saw it again some of them might seem more vital, I don't know.
It wasn't horrible, and Sandra and Nicole did a nice job. (I noticed that this movie follows the usual Sandra Bullock movie protocol, under which her hair starts out looking nice and gets progressively disheveled the more the movie goes on, until it looks like an old mop on her head, only to look nice again during the ending.) The other actors -- Stockard Channing in particular -- do their roles justice, but overall the movie was untimately pretty forgettable in my book. 2 out of 5 stars from me.
The women in the audience are loving it for the most part, so I guess my rating comes from me not exactly being the target audience.
Comment