I’ll say this for Hocus Pocus 2: it isn’t simply Hocus Pocus a second time, despite appearances. Are there similarities? Of course. For one, the setup is near-identical: the Sanderson sisters, an infamous trio of witches from Salem, Massachusetts, return to the world of the living on a Halloween night, thanks to the lighting of a black flame candle. They now have a second shot at returning to life permanently, if they can complete a certain spell before sunrise.

The opening follows in the footsteps of the original, too. An initial flashback to the 1600s is followed by down-to-earth high-school drama in the present day, which then segues into supernatural hijinks. And the three Sanderson sisters, played again by Bette Midler, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Kathy Najimy, exude as much campy enjoyment as they did the first go around, sneering and cackling and, presumably, ad-libbing with full-body glee. We’ve even got a couple of unnecessary musical numbers to round out the similarities.

But while Hocus Pocus is an average-to-fine version of something straightforward—“What if some unhinged witches needed defeating by some average kids?”—Hocus Pocus 2 is something weirder and more interestingly broken. First and foremost, it seems interested in being a full-on comedy. The first movie includes a few scattershot fish-out-of-water jokes, but nothing like Hocus Pocus 2’s marquee laughs sequence, in which the Sanderson sisters become convinced that a Walgreens is the new home for sinister supernatural phenomena. I chortled right through this scene. There’s also an appealingly stupid boyfriend character named Mike (Froy Gutierrez), who’s good for an occasional laugh. “I made an inference,” says our lead teenager, Becca (Whitney Peak). “Is that a spell?” Mike says in a hushed, uncertain whisper.

Hocus Pocus 2

Secondly and less favorably, while Hocus Pocus had a well-fleshed-out story for its teenage protagonists, Hocus Pocus 2 seems eager to show us that they know we’re here for the witches. As a result, it feels generous to describe the teenagers as protagonists at all. Their subplot here—Becca and her best friend Izzy (Belissa Escobedo) have drifted apart from a third best friend, Cassie (Lilia Buckingham), and each party thinks the other is neglecting their relationship—is thinly sketched and predictable, although the young actors acquit themselves as best they can, considering that none of their characters have been given personalities. A trio of girls who play the young Sanderson sisters in the 1600s do even better, despite some appallingly conjugated Early Modern English.

So, the witches have been promoted to protagonist status, and their comedic side has been dialed way up. The problem is that the first movie’s witches, who cursed a boy to nine million cat-lifetimes of misery and were perfectly ready to murder children, also came with a certain amount of spooky menace. Hocus Pocus 2 dials this way back, to the point that during a flashback sequence to the first film, when we see the witches kidnapping and terrorizing a young girl, I felt vaguely disoriented. Surely these weren’t our goofy witches, whom we’d just seen licking serums in the cosmetics aisle.

The script even seems to make a self-referential nod to this change. A character named Gilbert—a magic shop owner played by a likable Sam Richardson, who receives an inexplicable amount of screentime—is a big fan of the Sanderson sisters who declares that they were just misunderstood. As Gilbert gets his own threat of death from the witches, the movie clearly wants us to see that Gilbert was being ridiculous, and that these are attempted murderers he was talking about … but the movie also wants to be a feel-good buddy comedy about how sisterhood, whether between witches or between our lightly featured teenagers, is the greatest magic of all, or something.

Hocus Pocus 2

In short, these witches don’t feel capable of cruelty, let alone real evil. This makes them great characters in sketch-like comedy where they treat automatic sliding doors as powerful, unknowable magic. But it makes them tough to swallow in any scene that involves danger, or stakes in general. The first film seemed to understand that the witches are fun and lovable because they’re evil, not despite that fact. Hocus Pocus 2 seems worried that if the witches come off too morally bankrupt, we’ll suddenly stop enjoying them, which is just not how any of this works. It’s Halloween! Let them be evil.

In any case, as a result of all this, the enjoyment tapers off hard in the third act, when the jokes dry up and we’re meant to start taking the events more seriously. Far be it from me to make prescriptions, but I also suspect that if Gilbert’s fetch-quest had been handed to one of our trio of teens, giving us more time to get to know them, the ending might have landed with less of a bump.

So much for story. Visually speaking, the thing is a real mess. I physically recoiled at one scene, when the witches are flying above the city, washed out in greenish light that utterly fails to interact with the blue-grey mud of the scenery below. The witches’ costumes and makeup are fun, in the shaggy, cozy way that characterized the original, but otherwise, the textures alternate between plasticky dullness and unappealing sheens. This is probably why the Walgreens sequence works best: the movie’s visual sensibilities seem best suited to an over-lit corporate commercial, not for something dark or atmospheric.

But, at the end of the day, I struggle to think badly of Hocus Pocus 2 for its appearance, or even for the muddled sentimentality that defangs the witches. It’s a cozy little comedy that wants us to laugh, and I did laugh. It’s a kids’ Halloween flick that wants its witches’ campy antics to be enjoyed, and I did enjoy them. The actors had fun, and the screenplay is essentially fun, and while watching, I imagined a child version of myself having a lot of fun, too.

Rioghnach Robinson lives in Chicago, where she spends 70% of her waking hours dissecting the mindsets of fictional characters; the remaining 30% go toward rubbing her palms together in doomed attempts to generate heat. She writes books under the pen name Riley Redgate, most recently Alone Out Here (Disney Hyperion/2022), and she has also written for The Onion, America's finest news source. You can find her on InstagramTumblrLetterboxd, or her website.