Director: Zoe Lister-Jones
Distributor: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment
Duration: 97 minutes
The Craft: Legacy (VOD) – Movie Review
The Craft was a fairly big hit when it was released in 1996. A coven of high-school girls that turned into full-blown witches who worked out spells against those who did them wrong, was an interesting concept and it is still a loved movie to this day. Now, in 2020 a somewhat spiritual successor was created with The Craft: Legacy. With the habit of spawning sequels of older movies, we were quite curious to see how this one would turn out. All these reboots and sequels often lean towards being very good or becoming total failures. The Craft: Legacy was the latter, being forgettable, annoying and just horribly predictable. Once again we find ourselves watching a film that should be called, ‘All Men Are Bad 2020-edition’.
The Craft: Legacy is all about Lily (Cailee Spaeny) and her mother, Helen (Michelle Monaghan), moving to a whole new area. Helen is moving in with her boyfriend, Adam (David Duchovny), who also has three sons. The weirdness already starts from the beginning, as it’s clear that Lily barely knows Adam and is already expected to move into his house because her mother wants to take her relationship to the next step. It also seems like the mother actually barely knows Adam. That being said, Lily starts going to a new school, where she immediately gets bullied by the stereotypical jock, Timmy (Nicholas Galitzine). When he keeps pressing on, something otherworldly happens when Lily knocks him a few feet in the air. Attracting the attention of a trio of girls that are into witchcraft, soon their journey in the occult begins as a coven of four.
Even though the movie is only roughly around an hour and a half, nothing truly happens outside of the girls using their powers for childish punishments and mind control. Many scenes feel dragged out and don’t add anything to the overall story value. With the inclusion of a male figure promoting masculinity, you already know who’s going to be the evildoer of the film. This film doesn’t really hold any surprises and feels bland from start to finish.
Again, we wish to stress that we love inclusion and a certain degree of political correctness, but when it’s shoved in your face as it is in this film, you can’t help but roll your eyes throughout the entire experience. When looking at other films such as The Personal History of David Copperfield where inclusion was handled perfectly, The Craft: Legacy feels like a project of someone who is angry at the world for something that may, or may not, have happened to them in the past. Again, the aforementioned movie is a stellar example of inclusion and we hope many more films like that are created with such craftsmanship, while at the same time hoping garbage like this and Black Christmas are soon to be banished to a funeral pyre, where people of different origins and backgrounds can converse around said fire. Also, when you have a diverse cast of characters and are ranting about inclusion, it feels a bit out of place to have the black girl state she wants ‘more black friends’, while she is being treated perfectly by her other friends. This defeats the purpose of ‘inclusion’ and equality completely.
Acting performances are okayish at best, seeing what the cast had to work with. The movie tends to resort to stereotypes and clichés to bring its characters to life. Sadly, this makes the performances feel shallow and you never truly care about who’s doing what and why. The whole mother-daughter dynamic of this film also feels very off, making the experience even worse.
As we viewed the VOD version of this film, we have no idea what extras may be included with a physical edition. Nonetheless, the movie doesn’t have that much to highlight other than where the idea came from, and some explanation about the source material. As the original movie is already 24 years old, some views of the original cast could have also been a nice inclusion.
Conclusion
The Craft: Legacy was a movie we were eagerly looking forward to, as this could have made a classic franchise relevant again. Instead, we were treated to generic politically correct rubbish that feels unnatural in how it handles inclusion. While this production may bring a bit of joy to fans of the original The Craft, actually watching this film will leave you with a bad aftertaste and disappointment as to how movies are evolving. While political ‘themes’ can perfectly be embedded in films, it gets tedious when it’s enveloping the entire experience.
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