A Practical Misstep: Thoughts on Practical Magic 2

4 October 2026

A Practical Misstep: Thoughts on Practical Magic 2

Yesterday I went to watch Practical Magic 2, and it was a real mixed bag. First off, let me say the movie has something like 35% rotten tomatoes but over 80% popcorn ratings; that is to say, film critics kinda hated it but audiences love it. This assessment makes sense to me. If you’re a huge fan of the original, a fan of the characters Sally and Jillian, and/or a fan of Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman as actresses, you’re going to love this movie almost no matter what. The movie can rest on the laurels of legacy because the original is just so timeless; many filmgoers will go precisely for a second installation of the Owens sisters, no matter the premise’s unbelievability, the laziness of writing in dialogue and characters, or the bad direction. And, although I did not myself particularly enjoy the alterations to Sally’s character at the start of the film, as a Practical Magic-for-lifer, I did enjoy returning to the Owens women’s world.

Let’s talk first about the premise’s believability. The original film concludes with Gary Hallet choosing to stay and love Sally, despite the family’s curse (that any man an Owens woman loves would die—a curse wrought by their ancestor, Maria Owens, after she was jilted in love). We don’t know, for sure, whether they marry or what will be the nature of their love. However, Hallet’s justification is that the curse can only influence him if he believes in it, which he doesn’t. As Hallet is the singular man Sally conjured up to be “impossible,” or not to exist in the first place, we are given to believe him: he is the man to withstand this curse. This is where the story closes, with the hope that Hallet will survive the curse. It’s a light note. Upbeat. No suggestion whatsoever that Hallet might be mistaken about his imperviousness to the curse. Further, as an audience, we can be pleased this means Sally’s two girls, Kylie and Antonia, will have a stepfather, since their dad died a few years prior, succumbed to the same curse.

OK. So that sets the scene for the beginning of the second installment: Practical Magic 2. Except. Except. There’s no Gary Hallet. There’s no real mention of Gary Hallet beyond a brief snapshot of the family standing at a gravestone—such a brief snapshot, mind you, that I didn’t have enough time to read the name on it to confirm it was Gary and not Michael, Sally’s first husband, except that it had on it a five-pointed star: Gary’s talisman. Nobody says Gary’s name. Nobody refers to Michael. It’s like, poof! All of Sally’s history from the original film is just—vanished.

Yes; yes, it’s true the script alludes to this omission as an active decision on Sally’s part. She tells Jillian she wishes never to talk about the family, the curse, the fact that they’re witches—she wishes that her daughters would never know. That they would forget. Wait. That they would forget?! Sally thinks it’s possible that her daughters would forget jumping from a rooftop together, lighting candles by blowing on them together, shenanigans with their great-aunts? That these girls would somehow forget not only Gary, ostensibly their stepfather for even at least a brief time, but also their biological father Michael, whom they would have been old enough to play games with in the first film before he passed away?

I’m sorry. No. The liberties these writers have taken here to reinstate the Owens curse is far too great to pass the believability test, to suspend my disbelief. Kids remember shit vividly. Kids especially remember interesting shit like their own power to curse other kids with chicken pox, as Kylie did. It’s not like Kylie and Antonia were 2-3 years old when Gary came to town; they were fully 8-9 years old, if not older! They would have known they had powers, and they would have remembered that their family were witches. Don’t ask me to believe otherwise.

The aunties were another point of frustration for me. How could Kylie and Antonia not understand their great aunties were witches? Jet and Frannie were always open about their powers, as suggested early in the film with the lamp outside their door, inviting townspeople in for guidance and spells. Despite Sally’s request in the original film that the aunties do not do magic with her girls, they disobeyed. There is absolutely no reason to believe that they would have kept it silent with Kylie and Antonia over the years. The matriarchs? No way. I don’t buy it.

So, I suppose it was some hope for delightful writing, a beguiling plot, and beloved characters that kept me in my seat…except the writing did not get any better. My greatest frustration with the writing was the lazy dialogue. Much of the first half of the movie is spent in Sally and Jillian talking over one another, interrupting one another at a rate that infuriated my brain: nobody was listening to anyone else, and I couldn’t understand what anyone was saying. But it didn’t matter. Whenever I could discern what someone was saying, they weren’t actually saying anything: their sentences were fragments containing no meaning—no meat. The dialogue does not even improve halfway through the movie when Ian “unblocks” Sally’s powers and she realizes she hasn’t been listening.

Lazy dialogue is not limited to the Owens sisters, either! At one point, the audience is bedazzled by this gem of an exchange:

Ian: It’s dark out.

Jillian: Oh thank goodness; for a second there I thought I was going blind.

Granted, a few of the moviegoers behind me giggled at this nonsense, so maybe the writers were aiming at comedy? But I found it empty, banal, unfunny, and irrelevant to plot or characters, so it was lost on me.

The characters themselves also felt underdeveloped. For example, why did Sally give up her booming botanicals business? There was no reason to align botanicals with witchcraft if she wanted to separate herself from that…so what happened there? And why did she become a librarian? Just so Jet could find the Book of the Raven? That seems like an enormously convenient U-turn of character for Sally just to drop a book in Jet’s lap.

This brings me back to the aunties, whose characters are so deeply diluted in this new installation of the Owens family that they no longer feel like matriarchs. We see neither of the aunties doing any real magic in this film. They obviously never tell Kylie and Antonia that they are witches—which feels unlikely after the first movie, when they couldn’t stop themselves (it’s who they are!). In this movie the aunties just seem—decrepit? Weak? Voiceless? Inept and impotent? This is not the image I personally believe we should portray of aging matriarchs. I would prefer my aging witches to grow more powerful as they grow more stooped. Like oversteeped tea. Potent. Un-fuckwith-able. Impervious and immovable. This may be personal preference, but making Franny and Jet more formidable with age would’ve helped convey a message our culture/society needs more of: the power of matriarchal leadership.

Something about the flatness of Jillian’s character bothered me, too. Why does Sally get all the love? Jillian is just totally okay with Sally being the object of every man’s love, it seems. Sally gets three great love stories and Jillian gets bupkis. Is Jillian a closet lesbian? I mean, honestly, that would have made the story—and the plot surrounding the curse—far more interesting, wouldn’t it? What happens if one of the Owens woman falls in love with another woman? Does that other woman die the way a man might? I’d have followed that rabbit down its hole for sure!

Then, there are the characters Ian and Tom, both of whom are underdeveloped, both of whose backgrounds are exceptionally fuzzy, and both whose presences feel plot- instead of character-driven. In fact, even Gideon’s character has no backstory beyond his unswerving love for Kylie. Alright. Maybe this character lineup is a feminist’s dream: not a single man’s character is developed. That said, it doesn’t work for this here feminist. I prefer all my characters fully developed—yes, even men.

If I’m being not a little bit honest, I’d admit the writing feels so lazy, I for a moment wondered whether it was AI. But let’s not go there. Let’s hold on hope it’s just bad human writing. I don’t want to think about that.

Let me conclude this rant with something I know absolutely nothing about: directing. Another intangible that niggled at my brain throughout this movie was the unbelievability of the acting. The best example I can give of this is the moment that Kylie and Antonia are in bed together under the covers (mirroring the way their mothers did this after Michael passed in the first movie). In this scene, for some strange reason, it felt to me like Maisie Williams was acting, and she wasn’t believable. But. Maisie Williams?! Come on, this actress has played the stone-cold girl who has no name, Arya Stark. This actress is fire. So how is it possible that I could not get on board with Antonia under the covers with Kylie in that moment? It must be the direction, about which I know nothing. But if I can tell, in this one moment, that the direction is sub-par, then where else did poor direction influence the believability of characters, scene work, etc.?

Le sigh

Let me be honest: I had fun watching this. I enjoyed being dropped in the Owens’ world once more at this spooky time of year.

Am I also disappointed by the film? Yes. It feels in many ways like the reboot of Gilmore Girls: we want it to be the same thing all over again, we want to recapture a feeling we once had, but it’s been 20+ years, and nothing is ever the same. Everything changes. Maybe instead of rebooting things that were perfect in the first place, we should focus on creating new things.

Does this mean I don’t wish LAIKA Studios and Tim Burton would give us new stories in the worlds built for Coraline and The Nightmare Before Christmas? No. I do wish that. But I also know that they’d never hold a flame to their originals, and Practical Magic 2 is all the evidence I need to believe it. We don’t need more of a good thing, so maybe leave good things alone.