The 1998 film wasn't a huge hit in the box office and it didn't get great reviews, but it developed a cult following, even inspiring a TV series called Charmed (1998). Technically, the TV series premiered before the release of the film, but the film is based on a 1995 novel by Alice Hoffman. Reportedly, the creator of Charmed was Constance M. Burge. She researched witchcraft and initially wanted to set the show in Boston, which is the hometown of Hoffman. A lot of the aesthetics of the show match Hoffman's story. Both are set in coastal towns or cities. Both are set in homes that are Victorian era in architecture. Both are focused on sisters who initially start out ignorant of their powers and by the end have to learn to embrace them.
The 1998 feature had an aspect that Burge's series didn't. The premise of that nearly 30-year-old flick and even this current one is that the women in a family of witches are cursed, so that any man who loves them and whom they love in return will die a swift, early death. This curse goes back generations to colonial days, which means that potentially dozens of men were needlessly killed. The 1998 film though didn't center its main story on this premise. The curse was merely an excuse to turn its protagonist off from wanting to embrace magic and thus her true nature. The main story of the 1998 feature was essentially a Thelma & Louise (1991) kind of tale that more had to do with murder in self-defense than it did with the use of magic for its two leads. In the whole of that 1998 story, only one real magic spell is even cast. Arguably, more magic is used in this film and a lot more VFX, but it still feels incredibly underwhelming. One episode of Charmed has its characters using more magic than this film, which runs the length of three episodes.
Sandra Bullock (Gravity and The Blind Side) stars as Sally Owens, the mother of two daughters living just outside Boston, Massachusetts. Her daughters are grown and have moved outside the house. Sally continues to dwell in the home where her mother and grandmother were raised. Her mother is no longer alive. Only Sally's aunts remain, and they too dwell in that large family home. Sally is a two-time widow. The father of her two daughters died, as a result of the curse and her love interest from the 1998 film also died because of the curse. She has resigned to a life of loneliness, working as a librarian. She's embraced the librarian stereotype of being stodgy and chaste, and rather boring.
Nicole Kidman (The Hours and Moulin Rouge!) co-stars as Gillian Owens, the older sister of Sally. Gillian is the opposite of the librarian stereotype. She's very outgoing, fun-loving, adventurous, and loud. She acts like an overgrown child. Yet, she's very much an adult because unlike her sister, Gillian isn't chaste. She goes through men like toiler paper. She has a very active, if not overly active sex life. Her men don't end up dead though because she doesn't fall in love with them. She basically just has one-night-stands. She's sworn off romance, not in a way that's sad or cynical. She's having fun without guilt or shame. She doesn't have any children and seems resigned to not have any because that might involve falling in love with a man, although she could adopt or go through in-vitro fertilization, but it's never an issue. She seems to be happy being childless.
Joey King (The Act and The Kissing Booth) also co-stars as Kylie Owens, the eldest daughter of Sally. She seems to work at a college or she might be a college student still trying to figure out her life. She does have a boyfriend, Gideon, played by Xolo Maridueña (Blue Beetle and Cobra Kai). Unfortunately, Kylie doesn't know about the family curse. Sally chose to keep that a secret and actively made her children forget, using some kind of spell. When Kylie and Gideon declare their love for one another, the curse comes for Gideon. Now, in the previous film, the curse caused Sally's first husband and Kylie's father to be killed when he was hit by a car. In a nod to the previous, the same fate happens to Gideon. Yet, he doesn't die immediately. He's instead put into a coma.
This is perhaps the film's first mistake. Being a fan of Xolo Maridueña, given how charming and talented he is, it was a shame to see that he's basically in a coma for the majority of this film. If the film wasn't going to kill him immediately and basically have him be this damsel-in-distress, it could have kept him conscious and active in the story. This film is about female empowerment and sisterhood, so having him be active in the story could've detracted from that. However, another mistake or overlooked opportunity is the sidelining of Kylie's sister, Antonia Owens, played by Maisie Williams (The New Mutants and Game of Thrones). Antonia is a doctor or an aspiring one. She seems to be into science though. Yet, when magic is revealed to be in her family, she doesn't question it or want to study or analyze it. The film brushes over what would be her intellectual curiosity, or as a doctor, her desire to want to heal people using magic.
It's also odd that Antonia who is a doctor has never fallen in love. Presumably, she's gone through high school, college and even medical school, and apparently in all of that time, she's never had feelings for anyone. If the curse works on Kylie's boyfriend, it would also work on Antonia's boyfriend. Are we to assume that she's never had a boyfriend before this film? That would seem highly unlikely. Maybe she's asexual or aromantic. She could also be a lesbian. In the text of the 1998 film, it says the curse was targeted at men with whom the Owens women fell in love. It didn't seem to target women, so if someone in the Owens family were lesbian, then that would've precluded them from the curse. At first, that's what I thought the explanation would be for Antonia. Yet, the film just ignores her romantic life all together.
The film instead wants to be a comedy about two sisters bickering and picking on each other. There are so many scenes where Sally and Gillian are being bickering sisters, picking on one another. It's cute. It's funny. It's also refreshing to see two women in their age group doing so. They're bickering a little over what they were bickering over in the first film. Sally doesn't want to embrace her identity as a witch and embrace magic, whereas Gillian does. This would be fine, if we saw Gillian actually using magic more. The one thing that I loved about Charmed is that we saw the sisters using their magic and using their powers. Here, we don't see Gillian using magic pretty much at all until briefly at the end. We never understand what is the extent of her powers or what the extent is of what Gillian can do.
When it comes to magic, I'm not sure the film ever clarifies on how it works. By the end, it seems to affirm that in order to use magic, one has to be born with it. Yet, the first film had non-witch characters helping to use magic and cast a spell. The villain at the end seems like he can't use magic because he wasn't born with it, but he suggests that there's a certain power that the witches have that he wants. Yet, when it comes to Gillian or even Sally, the specifics of those powers are never nailed down. I was simply confused by what the magic was and who all could use it or not. Lee Pace (Foundation and Pushing Daisies) rounds out the cast as Ian Wright, and he's a very appealing and incredibly sexy presence. He nails being a love interest for sure.
Rated PG-13 for some violent content, suggestive material, and brief strong language.
Running Time: 2 hrs. and 10 mins.
In theaters.
