Practical Magic was a movie far ahead of its time. It was genuinely bold to try and make a sincerely feminist movie about women rallying together to support each other in the face of toxic masculinity, all with a distinctly pagan witchcraft motif. Nowadays, it feels like such a movie would feel right on the edge where it’s relevant and familiar without being played out.

We’ve seen no shortage of similar “feminine solidarity against toxic masculinity” movies in recent memory (Is God Is only came out a few months ago), and it feels like pagan witchcraft is in vogue right now. (In my hometown of Portland, at least, I can tell you for a certainty that it is.) Hell, this was more or less the foundation of Netflix’s recent and highly successful take on “Sabrina the Teenage Witch”.

But back in 1998, the filmmakers were more or less working from scratch. For all its missteps, I’m genuinely impressed with how Practical Magic dealt with themes and ideas that grew increasingly relevant, and did it several decades before audiences or filmmakers were so practiced at exploring these concepts on film.

I would’ve been perfectly happy with a reboot. There was so much potential here for a modern filmmaker to take another crack at adapting the novel. Alas, we live in the age of the “legacy sequel”, in which Hollywood is desperately trying to prove that the stars and franchises from two or three decades ago remain every bit as viable as they once were.

So here we are with Practical Magic 2, in which producers Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman return alongside Dianne Wiest and Stockard Channing. I’m sorry to report that overrated hack Akiva Goldsman is back to write the script, but he did get assistance from Georgia Pritchett (a recurring Armando Iannucci collaborator, with a long and respectable list of TV accomplishments besides). We’ve also got Kelly Marcel as a credited screenwriter, previously responsible for 50 Shades of Grey, Cruella, and the Venom trilogy. Yikes.

Perhaps more importantly, Griffin Dunne did not return to direct. This time, we’ve got Susanne Bier, best known to American filmgoers for collaborating with Bullock on Bird Box. Don’t be so quick to hold that against her. Even a cursory online search will show that Bier is a highly accomplished and award-winning filmmaker, with an impressively eclectic filmography overseas.

I hasten to point out that Evan Rachel Wood and Alexandra Artrip were not brought back to reprise their roles. It seems our sequel must have been set about fifteen years after the first movie instead of thirty, and it’s rather important that Sally’s daughters are college-age. Thus we have Maisie Williams and Joey King — both highly accomplished and in-demand actors far beyond their years — stepping in to respectively play Antonia and Kylie.

And Aidan Quinn doesn’t show up because his character is dead. Yeah, it looks like the Owen family curse (i.e. anyone the Owens women fall in love with dies horribly) kicked in shortly after the first movie ended, and the poor guy lasted just long enough to marry Sally. So the film opens with a distraught Sally swearing off magic, distancing herself from the family legacy so she and her daughters can have a shot at a normal life.

So we’re back where we started at the opening of the first movie. And we’re stuck watching the protagonist go through the exact same arc all over again. Right off the bat, we’re in trouble. We’ll come back to that.

Anyway, we pick back up when Sally’s daughters are twenty-somethings. Antonia is the straight-laced go-getter who’s working at a hospital in the process of becoming a neurosurgeon. While Kylie is the college student who seems far more interested in her boyfriend (Gideon, played by Xolo Mariduena). The bottom line is that — as the characters outright tell us repeatedly — we’ve got a watered-down retread of the Sally/Gillian dynamic, as Kylie is essentially a clone of her mother while Kylie takes after her aunt Gillian. Not even ten minutes in and I’ve got a really bad feeling about this.

The plot picks up when the Owens curse strikes and Gideon gets hit by a car. Modern medicine intervenes and Gideon is kept alive — for now — but he’s stuck in a coma. Couple this with the revelation that all the rumors about her family are real and Sally did everything she could to keep witchcraft a secret from her daughters, and, uh… well, Kylie takes that about as well as you’d expect.

At the exact same time, a series of plot contrivances have put Kylie in possession of a spellbook that sets her on a quest to break the family curse and save her boyfriend. Unfortunately, this turns out to be a false book of dark magic, which means that Kylie is in mortal peril. Thus we have our reason for Sally and Gillian (again, that’s Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman, for those keeping track) to go off on a series of comical arguments and misunderstandings with occasional breaks to deal with the actual plot.

Oh, and Sally’s pissed off that her big plan of repressing her family’s history didn’t make it go away — just like when the exact same plan failed in the last movie! — and she’s taking it out on Gillian. Which means that both Sally and Gillian are stuck with the same banter and the same development arcs as last time. That’s not enough to cut it this time. Not only because it’s a redundant rehash that resets everything like the first movie never happened, and not only because the actors are trying and failing to pretend like they’re not 30 years older.

No, the big problem here is that the characters and their banter haven’t improved, but so much around them has.

To start with, Aunt Jet (Wiest) passes away at the end of the first act. Again, there’s a strong parallel here with the deaths of Sally and Gillian’s parents at the start of the first movie. But those deaths happened offscreen. Here, we spend significantly more time getting to know Aunt Jet and her relationships with the other characters, and she dies onscreen. So the death hits a lot harder, with a clearer and more heartfelt statement about grief, death, family ties, the fragility and value of life, and so on. That’s a marked improvement.

More importantly, the first movie was about Sally getting over her fears of her family history so she could find her own happiness and give her sister a helping hand. That in itself is a neat story. But in this movie, Sally’s cowardice directly results in some unsuspecting guy put into a life-threatening coma, her daughter’s run away from her, and now she has to embrace her lineage so she can save her daughter and hopefully earn forgiveness in the process. The stakes are so much higher and the themes are so much clearer, it’s such a better story.

But there are problems. Major problems.

For instance, it bears mentioning that this picture put Jaime fucking Reyes in the cast, and he barely gets anything to do before spending most of the film in a coma. Sure, he sells the all-important chemistry with King, but that’s it. More importantly, Antonia — played by Maisie freaking Williams — spends the whole movie watching over the coma patient. That’s it. That’s all she does. She doesn’t even do anything to help Gideon out of the coma, all she does is stand around and look concerned. Oh, and she does play the “straight man” against Stockard Channing chewing the scenery, which somehow adds insult to injury.

Considering how the concept of sisterhood is so foundational to this series, it’s unacceptable that Kylie does everything to drive the plot forward while her sister does fuck-all. Especially considering how Williams and King effortlessly sell their sibling chemistry in their scenes together. Seriously, Williams is demonstrably talented enough to hold her own against everyone else in this cast and she’s ideally placed for a pivotal role in the story, what the fuck happened?!

Then we have the matter of the male lead. Lee Pace shows up as Professor Ian Wright, a paranormal expert with a checkered past, yet he’s respected by others in the field. He’s positioned as a love interest for Sally. If you’re familiar with these sisters and their track record with male love interests (most especially a roguish figure who dabbles in dark magic), you can predict how well they take to him.

To be entirely fair, Pace makes good use of his innate charm and his villainous chops, expertly playing a character who could go either way. I might add that their suspicions of him provide a convenient excuse for Sally and Gillian to ditch him when the plot demands a big hero moment shared between the sisters. But then we get the scene in which Wright performs some kind of mumbo-jumbo to unlock Sally’s powers. It’s not through some huge character moment or accomplishment for Sally, the male lead simply waves his hands and it’s done for her. To repeat, what the fuck.

Speaking of which, there’s the matter of the “toxic masculinity” theme. Without spoiling too much, we do eventually learn that the Big Bad of the movie is some entitled jerk with a bruised ego. Here we finally get a character who calls Sally out on her shit, which was something she badly needed. Furthermore, if she’s so dead-set on running away from her powers, repeatedly trying to renounce her family legacy no matter how many times it’s been thoroughly proven that she can’t, why not let someone else take the magic away from Sally and her kids?

It’s a “be careful what you wish for” scenario, which is genuinely interesting in the context of this series. Here’s the problem: It doesn’t connect. Sure, I get how the big evil plan makes sense in terms of theme and character. But if I had to map out this plot and draw a clear line connecting all the events and motivations that brought us from Point A to Point B, I’m not sure I could.

Honestly, the third act felt limp in a number of ways. A lot of that has to do with the extended denouement that keeps on dragging its feet long after the actual plot is over. As for the climax itself, magic isn’t used in any way that’s creative or exciting or visually impressive. Everything is resolved with the characters throwing pixels at each other, which feels far too easy.

Perhaps more importantly, it doesn’t hold up in comparison to the previous film. Sure, it’s nice when Gillian and Sally inevitably reconcile, but the first movie showed these same women rallying the women of their town to form their own freaking coven and save each other with witchcraft. That’s empowering and awesome on a level this film never even aspires to.

Practical Magic 2 is a frustrating case in which all the pieces are here, but they don’t fit together. Looking back — most especially at that extended denouement — I think this is a case of misplaced priorities. Personally, I thought the themes and the plot were potentially fascinating, which makes it more disappointing that they didn’t sufficiently gel. Perhaps because the filmmakers devoted so much time to Bullock and Kidman clowning around together. This might also explain why Antonia and Kylie spent pretty much the entire movie apart, so we didn’t get a second pair of sisters going through the exact same schtick and taking the spotlight away from Bullock/Kidman.

This film had everything it needed to deliver a feminist character drama with spectacular magic, cross-generational themes of family and grief, and world-building that deepened what the first movie established. But that’s not the movie we got. Sure, we got a bit of that, but only barely enough to justify shooting a funny little chick flick with the nostalgic joy of Bullock/Kidman going through the comedic motions of thirty years ago. Then again, the film does deliver on that front. And maybe that’s all the fans wanted.

So if that’s all you’re looking for, go ahead and check it out. I hope the fans enjoy it, because there’s no way in hell we’re getting a third movie the way this one ended. So maybe we can close the book on this iteration of the series and get that proper reboot someday.