#it's just a string of largely unconnected plot threads that goes nowhere in the end

[keishajay]

Hocus Pocus 2 is... a giant missed opportunity

I really hope this isn’t just me being too old and jaded to enjoy new things anymore, but I HATED this movie. It was just boring and unfunny with no direction and the same pandering message that all movies seem to have nowadays. The writing choices honestly led me to believe the writers had never even seen the original, and the whole time, I couldn’t identify who this movie was made for. At first, I assumed it was just nostalgia baiting for people like me who love the original, and then, they nerfed the threat of the witches. Then, I figured it was for teenagers as their first exposure to Hocus Pocus, but then, they overloaded the whole thing with references from the first movie that nobody who hadn’t seen it already would get. Is it supposed to empower teenage girls? I honestly can’t tell. If you’ve never seen the original, the witches are kind of painted like victims in this one with the protagonists winning by killing them. I don’t even think it’s colorful and exciting enough to be for younger kids. Nothing really happens for a good chunk of its runtime.

There is but one good thing about this movie, and that is the original Sanderson sisters. They’re back and having just as much fun as before. They’re fun to watch when they’re on screen, but their chemistry and goofiness wasn’t enough to save this garbage fire of a script.

#1: Historical accuracy is a suggestion in this movie. Those girls would NOT have been allowed to live alone and act the way they did in the 1600s. Blah, blah, blah, witches and magic exist, but this takes place in the real world with real world history and rules. Winnie would not have been given a choice to marry that kid. His family probably would’ve taken her and her sisters in after their parents died, just waiting until they could be married. That’s two more hands to help in what looks like a farming hamlet. If they wanted Winnie to have that protective, older sister vibe, why not make her hate her forced husband? Why not make the sisters’ new guardians awful to them? You get the same outcome with a more sensible, relatable setup.

#2: The main characters have no personality. I didn’t even know one of the girls’ names until the end credits. All three of them are cardboard cutout teenage girls with the edges removed. And their “conflict” wasn’t even a conflict. I assumed Becca and Cassie were acting weird because one of them confessed to same-sex attraction (that’s exactly what that weirdness would’ve been if they were opposite genders). And then, it just turns out Cassie wanted her old friends to hang out with her new friends. Granted, that’s a very teenager fight to have, but it’s resolved and explained in all of ten seconds, and then, everyone’s just suddenly over it. That is not how teenagers act. These girls would’ve been so much more interesting if they’d just lifted them straight from The Craft.

#3: None of the characters have any agency in this story. In the original, the goals are clear and laid out from the start. The sisters need to brew their potion to kill children and make themselves young again before sunrise. Max, Dani, and Allison need to outsmart the witches to stop them, effectively cleaning up their own mess. Simple, clean, and easy to follow. What was the goal in the sequel? Becca and Izzy are following the same mess-cleaning plot as the first, but it wasn’t their mess in the first place. It was Gilbert’s fault, not theirs. They didn’t wake the witches by being stupid teenagers. They woke them because they were tricked. What was the witches’ goal? They didn’t have one until they saw the Mayor. Then, they wanted to kill him for like a second, and then, for some reason, they decided doing the all-powerful witch spell was what they wanted. Again, for reasons. Were they only awakened for that one night? Who knows. The movie and the witches themselves act like they have all the time in the world.

#4: The rules from the first are broken or ignored. Mary explicitly smells Dani and tells the others exactly how old she is in the first. Yet, they’re fooled somehow by two teenagers lying about their ages in the sequel. How, if Mary can tell a child’s age through smell? Binx states that nothing good can come from the spell book and repeatedly warns Max and Allison not to even open it. Now, in the sequel, the book bound by human skin suddenly can be used for good. It even has a personality now, and it didn’t want Winnie to use that power spell. Why? Because the book cared about her and her sisters? Again, why? It’s just handed over in the prologue and doesn’t seem bothered in the least about losing that master. It had just abandoned Winnie for Becca in the previous scene as well. Are the writers trying to imply that good people can make bad people change? The book has a personality now, after all.

#5: There are no stakes. Yes, this is a family movie. I get it, but you can still have stakes and threatening villains without crippling your script. The sisters have ample opportunity to kill Becca and Co. but choose not to until the plot armor kicks in to prevent them from being able to do so. They even threaten to kill them multiple times and don’t do it when there’s literally no reason why they wouldn’t. Morality certainly didn’t stop them from trying in the first one. As stated in point 3, the witches have no concrete goal for the heroes to stop. There’s no statement made about how to defeat the witches or even a ticking clock for urgency. The girls trap them once, which again led me to question why the writers kept ignoring Mary’s sense of smell, and then, all three witches just end up dead by the end through a combination of hubris and framing murder in a very questionable light. They literally assisted in Winnie’s suicide by lying to her about the spell being able to bring her sisters back. And this is framed as the kind thing to do. Excuse me. What? 

#6: The all-powerful witch spell is an awful plot device. The story warns us that this spell is very dangerous and should never be used. The book doesn’t even like it, and it hasn’t removed the spell itself, for some reason. (It can open itself, fly around, and select pages on its own. Why couldn’t it remove a page?) Why is it so dangerous the book gifted by Satan and bound with human skin doesn’t want it used? Who knows. The only indication of its danger is the very clearly stated cost of the spell. Fine. But if Winnie was now all-powerful, why couldn’t she just magic her sisters back to life somehow? She should be able to do anything she wants. She could just rewind time if she felt like it. There’s no inherent limit to omnipotence, and the story never provides one either. It also begs the question of why they never used it before. Why suck the lives out of children to stay young forever when you could just be all-powerful? Why didn’t the woods witch use it? Or did she and she was warning them as a cautionary tale? Who knows. The writers couldn’t seem to come up with an answer beyond Winnie promised she wouldn’t.

#7: Becca’s magic was essentially pointless to the plot. Everything she did with it could’ve just as easily been achieved with salt, which they used multiple times in the movie. She can’t even stand up to Winnie with it. So, what was its purpose exactly? The movie would’ve worked just as well without it. Hell, it might’ve even been better off that way. Then, we could’ve seen some ingenuity from our “heroes” as they stand up to people much more powerful than them.

90% of this movie just left me asking why over and over again. They had the makings of something that could’ve been fun. Maybe not great but at least fun. Bring the witches back by accident and focus on the omnipotence spell. They learned their lesson from last time and are just gonna skip all the child-murder nonsense. Turn Gilbert into an actual villain like Ben Ravencroft from Scooby-Doo instead of half-assing it and having him forgiven by the end for no reason at all. He didn’t redeem himself. He did nothing except trick people the entire story, and he’s a good guy at the end? Turn Becca, Izzy, and Cassie into Sarah, Bonnie, and Rochelle from the Craft. (Nancy’s a little intense for a family movie.) That setup pokes that nostalgia itch for both of these movies. Hell, go the extra mile and turn Gilbert into Nancy. Even that would’ve been cooler than what we got. How much better would it have been to have the girls go up against their power-hungry friend at the end of the movie? For those that want to argue that it’s fine the way it is, sure, that’s an opinion. But why would you want fine when things could be better? You lose nothing by having a solid story and a real magic system, so why not have them and make your movie better?

So, yeah, Hocus Pocus 2 is just missed opportunity 101 the movie. Not as bad as I was expecting but still not anywhere near what I would call good.