Hocus Pocus 2 (2022)

The passage of twenty-nine years has done little to age the Sanderson sisters, who return from the afterlife with the same nasal squabbling and the same appetite for children. Disney, sensing a reliable harvest, has moved the proceedings to its streaming service and handed the mortal duties to three high schoolers: Becca, Izzy, and Cassie. The trio is anchored by Whitney Peak and Belissa Escobedo, and the supporting cast runs through Sam Richardson, Tony Hale in a dual role, and a trio of drag performers from RuPaul's Drag Race who appear for roughly ninety seconds as the witches at a Halloween contest. The film registers this inclusiveness the way a corporation registers a quarterly dividend. It is present, it is tidy, and it asks nothing of the audience.

The screenplay's one gesture toward serious cultural interpretation arrives in the 1653 prologue, where Winifred is banished by a reverend for declining an arranged marriage. Witch trial lore becomes a parable of patriarchal authority, delivered in period costume and then abandoned for the rest of the running time. The girls form a coven, which supplies the film's female friendship arc, but the empowerment is the standard studio variety: warm, vague, and resolved by sunrise. Race goes unmentioned throughout, and no historical reckoning interrupts the candy jokes.

The result is a Halloween comedy that functions as a nostalgia delivery system and little else. The gags are broad, the Walgreens detour plays as pure slapstick, and the moral instruction is limited to a faint suggestion that teenage girls should believe in themselves. For a genre that has spent the past decade converting children's entertainment into civics homework, this one is almost lazy about it. We classify it as a mild case, notable only for casting choices made in a boardroom and a witch origin story that flatters its audience without ever challenging it. The sequel is harmless, competently made, and entirely content to be forgotten by November.