The sequel's first spell is undoing the original ending
Practical Magic ended by allowing Sally to accept her powers, Gillian to survive the wreckage of an abusive relationship and the Owens women to discover that their strange little family could exist openly in the community around them. The curse appeared broken. The sequel begins by taking that victory apart.
Gary is gone, making Sally a widow again. Her response was to reject magic and erase her daughters' memories of their supernatural inheritance. Years later, Kylie tells Gideon she loves him and he falls into a coma, dragging the Owens curse back into a family that Sally had tried to protect through denial.
That reversal has been one of the most common complaints across the critical response. It is not inherently a bad dramatic idea. Sally becoming so frightened by loss that she repeats an older pattern of suppression could have been a powerful continuation of her character. The screenplay mostly needs it to reset the board.
Bullock and Kidman still work immediately
There is no awkward reacquaintance between Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman. Sally remains tightly controlled, permanently preparing for the next catastrophe. Gillian still moves through the room with a looseness that often disguises how closely she is watching her sister. Their contrast survives nearly three decades with very little effort.
Which makes the decision to keep them in conflict for so much of the film especially peculiar. The 1998 movie could jump from romance to domestic violence, broad comedy and supernatural possession without completely disintegrating because the emotional continuity was Sally and Gilly.
Practical Magic 2 frequently moves that relationship to the side of Kylie's quest. WBUR and several French reviews were particularly frustrated by the choice. Whenever Bullock and Kidman are simply allowed to argue, tease each other or share a look that carries years of history, the movie becomes lighter on its feet.
A new generation arrives without a new sisterhood to match
Joey King's Kylie becomes the main representative of the younger Owens generation. Learning that her mother removed an entire magical identity from her memory gives King a useful mixture of anger and fascination, while Gideon's condition provides a straightforward reason for Kylie to go searching for a permanent end to the curse.
Maisie Williams has far less to do as Antonia. The imbalance is not simply a question of screen time. A film so invested in the idea of sisters inheriting knowledge from sisters has two younger Owens women available and spends relatively little time building their relationship.
TheWrap identified the contradiction particularly clearly. Antonia becomes one of the film's most obvious missing pieces, especially when the original source material offered considerably more room for her. The adaptation expands the Owens family while narrowing one of the relationships that could have justified that expansion.
England changes the scenery more than the rhythm
Moving the search to England should provide a useful shift in texture. Old houses, libraries, family history and a more ancient branch of the Owens mythology give Susanne Bier an attractive visual playground. There are individual compositions where that promise is visible.
The journey itself can feel strangely unhurried. Gideon is still in a coma, Kylie believes the answer may lie at the end of this search, and an entire family curse is theoretically in play. Yet passages drift rather than tighten.
Lee Pace helps by making Ian Wright instantly watchable. His chemistry with Bullock gives Sally's romantic material more conviction than the amount of development it receives on the page. The actors get to the connection before the screenplay does.
Making the magic bigger sometimes makes it less magical
The original film's witchcraft was memorable because so much of it felt domestic. Herbs, kitchens, candles, rituals, objects and half-serious family rules created the impression that magic had been absorbed into everyday life long before the audience arrived.
The sequel is more interested in giving supernatural power a visible digital form. Some of those effects are perfectly functional. Others, as TheWrap and several critics noted, look surprisingly weak and interrupt scenes that are trying to carry real emotion.
The issue goes beyond visual-effects quality. Practical Magic was never appealing because its witches could produce the biggest spectacle. A tangible kitchen ritual still belongs to this world more naturally than an elaborate piece of computer-generated sorcery.
Franny and Jet understand the passage of time better than the plot does
Stockard Channing and Dianne Wiest return as Franny and Jet, and the material involving the aunts contains some of the sequel's most affecting ideas. Their age is not treated as a problem to solve or an excuse to make them helpless. They remain funny, autonomous and entirely themselves.
The film becomes briefly less interested in restoring 1998 and more interested in what almost thirty real years mean inside a magical family. The oldest generation has preserved knowledge, relationships and a particular way of living. Eventually preservation has to become transmission.
These scenes carry a weight that no callback can manufacture. TheWrap was among the more positive reviews partly because of this handling of Franny and Jet, and it is the strongest argument for the sequel's existence.
Two hours and ten minutes is a lot of potion
The most consistent criticism is simply that the movie runs too long. Variety, NME, RogerEbert.com and much of the French press describe some version of the same problem: a relatively direct curse-breaking story becomes crowded with subplots, exposition and repetitions.
There are three generations of Owens women, Gideon's fate, Sally's grief, Kylie's discovery of magic, an English branch of the mythology, new romantic material and the obligation to revisit beloved pieces of the original. Nobody is fully discarded, but several people still end up underserved.
Nostalgia suffers from the same excess. Midnight margaritas and familiar musical or visual cues can be delightful because they trigger memory quickly. Repetition makes the mechanism visible. Eventually the audience is no longer remembering the first movie; it is watching the sequel remember it on command.
The movie already had the spell it keeps trying to summon
There is still something unusual and welcome about a major studio fantasy built around Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman while Dianne Wiest and Stockard Channing remain meaningful parts of the story rather than ceremonial cameos. Practical Magic 2 is often at its best when it simply recognizes the value of the people it managed to bring back.
The more sympathetic reviews from The Guardian, the Los Angeles Times and TheWrap respond to exactly that pleasure. The film retains some of the first movie's strange tonal personality. It can be sentimental, ridiculous, romantic and unexpectedly moving within the same stretch.
That charm is real enough to keep the sequel from becoming empty franchise archaeology. It is also strong enough to reveal how unnecessary some of the surrounding machinery is. Bullock and Kidman can still make Sally and Gilly feel like sisters. Wiest and Channing can still make the Owens house feel inhabited rather than reconstructed.
Practical Magic 2 spends 130 minutes searching for a way to recreate its predecessor's spell. The answer was already sitting around the family table.