‘Hocus Pocus 2’ is a spell of nostalgia gone wrong
Photo Courtesy of Vanity Fair
Sequels to classic films have become a stable trend in Hollywood over the last few decades and, in some cases, have seen great success.
Recently, “Top Gun: Maverick” became the most successful film of the year, earning over $1.4 billion at the worldwide box office, according to Box Office Mojo, proving that sequels to classic films are not all bad and can even bring in new fans of the franchise.
Disney+’s “Hocus Pocus 2,” however, takes a leap of faith by trying to recreate the energy of the 1993 classic “Hocus Pocus,” and it fails miserably.
The film, which streamed exclusively on Disney+ on Sept. 30, serves essentially as a modern retelling of the story of the Sanderson sisters, three witches from Salem, Massachusetts, who were banished but revived by the infamous black flame candle after hundreds of years.
Calling the movie a “sequel” to the original feels like a stretch, since there isn’t any originality to set it apart from the first film at all; it’s a rehash of its spookier, more entertaining sister film – and not a very enjoyable one at that.
The lead characters, teenage Salem natives Becca (Whitney Peak) and Izzy (Belissa Escobedo), find themselves celebrating Becca’s 16th birthday, which happens to be on Halloween. Becca receives the black flame candle as a gift, and when she lights the candle under the full moon, the Sanderson sisters come alive once again.
Winifred Sanderson (Bette Midler), Sarah Sanderson (Sarah Jessica Parker) and Mary Sanderson (Kathy Najimy) all do an excellent job of reprising their roles from the original film, cementing themselves as one of the only bright spots in the sequel production.
It is nice to see the original magic of the Halloween classic live on through the kooky, colorful costumes and voices of the Sanderson sisters, but outside of the reprisal of those roles, the film doesn’t have much substance.
The biggest problem is the plot and the script. Not only is the plot uninteresting for a majority of the movie, with the ending as really the only eye-catching moment, and one could argue that even that is corny and cliché, but the attempted humor and light-heartedness of the film comes off as awkward, forced and just flat-out unfunny.
At the start of the movie, there is an unnecessarily long sequence of the Sanderson sisters running through a Walgreens, which is one of the film’s attempts at the sisters trying to fit into a modern society and learning about things such as skin care, which they were told is possessed by the spirits of children.
The sequence is a great example of the poor humor implemented in the script and comes off as more of a plug for brand deals (Sarah Sanderson uses a Swiffer as her new riding broom, for example), rather than just letting the lead actresses take over the screen and work the magic that they did in the original.
If anyone is looking for a Halloween movie to throw on in the background in between trick-or-treaters, then save “Hocus Pocus 2” for that. Otherwise, it is not a film worth investing the nearly two-hour runtime into, especially if you want to launch yourself into the Halloween spirit. Another classic like “Halloweentown” works perfectly instead.
The plot is bland, the jokes are corny and the magic of the original is just not there. Although it is nice to see these classic characters back on the screen, the end product was not worth the wait.
