As cumbersome and overlong as the 28-year wait between the 1998 original film and its sequel, “Practical Magic 2” serves as a next-generation reminder that sometimes the best way to let a beloved experience live on is by leaving it behind in one’s memory.
Led by Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman, director Griffin Dunne’s adaptation of Alice Hoffman’s 1995 novel “Practical Magic” gained a cult following over the years for its unwieldy combination of romantic comedy, domestic abuse and, yes, magic by using female friendship as the glue holding it together. Returning as producers, reuniting them with costars Dianne Wiest and Stockard Channing and replacing Dunne with Susanne Bier (who directed Bullock in “Bird Box,” and Kidman in TV’s “The Undoing” and “The Perfect Couple”), the two leads play the hits, repeating many of the elements that made the first film beloved — and, in the process, inadvertently exposing why not everyone thought the original was that great in the first place.
Bullock reprises her role as Sally, the older and ever more cautious of the Owens sisters. After two marriages that ended with her husband’s death because of a generations-old curse, Sally not only swears off romance but casts a spell that makes her twentysomething daughters Kylie (Joey King) and Antonia (Maisie Williams) forget they they’re in a family of witches. When Kylie’s boyfriend Gideon (Xolo Maridueña) gets critically injured shortly after she confesses her love for him, Gillian (Kidman) forces her sister to reveal the truth about the Owens women, causing a rift between a lovestruck daughter and a mother who wants only to protect her from heartbreak.
