Written And Directed by Zoe Lister-Jones
Lily (to Adam): "Now its you who's gonna burn."
As a 90s kid, I absolutely loved The Craft and before finally settling down to watch this, movie that I've been putting off for a year, I went and watched the original. For me, it naturally still holds up. For this movie, it also meant that the comparisons were going to be inevitable.
This movie flits between wanting to be a reboot but by the end of it, it ended up becoming a sequel to the 1996 cult classic. Both ideas are sound. They even work well together. If the first movie was a produce of it's time, this one certainly is as well. Though whether or not it will garner the positive legacy of what came before is probably less likely.
Shy girl Lily Schechner (Cailee Spaeny) and her mother, Helen (Michelle Monaghan) move in with the latter's new boyfriend, Adam Harrison (David Duchovny) and the latter's sons, Jacob (Charles Vandervaart), Isaiah (Donald MacLean Jr) and Abe (Julien Grey). Soon enough, Lily's in a new high school and soon makes enemies with Timmy (Nicholas Galitzene) but also some new friends as well.
The friends in question being witches Frankie (Gideon Adlon), Lourdes (Zoey Luna) and Tabby (Lovie Simone). When they realise that Lily is their fourth and a natural born witch, the foursome soon connect and put their newfound abilities to the test. Needless to say that Timmy becomes the first recipient of the girls magic.
Timmy in a lot of ways mirrors Chris from the original movie but things do take an interesting turn with him. While I think the movie should've avoided the near romance angle with Lily, it was intriguing to reveal the character as bisexual as well as his own interest in the supernatural. However for a movie that professes to be woke, it did commit the cardinal sin of killing off one of it's two LGBT characters.
The wokeness in question definitely can be a source of contention for the movie, only because sometimes it feels like the movie cant decide between taking the woke stuff seriously or outright parodying it. Despite some truly cringy dialogue in parts, the movie does a decent job in making the central characters likable enough as they come into their powers.
As for the baddie of the piece - yup, it's toxic masculinity encapsulated in Adam, who's actually a psycho warlock wanting to steal Lily's powers. Of course he underestimated the power of four and did not live to tell the tale. In terms of battles, it's a bit more simplistic than the one we had with Sarah and Nancy in the original.
Speaking of Nancy, the link that this movie has to the original is that Nancy was revealed to be Lily's biological mother and that Helen had an agreement of sorts never to tell Lily about her. It was nice to see Fairuza Balk reprise the role for the last scene of the movie bur considering the numbers this movie didn't make, I don't know if we'll ever a continuation of this set up.
- Props to the movie for having a trans character with Lourdes and not shying away from the character bring trans.
- This movie had an international release but also went to video on demand.
- Standout music: I'm going with Alanis Morissette Hand In My Pocket. The rest of the music wad not good.
- Chronology: I'm going to assume 2020 to match with the time of this movie, though Lily repeatedly kept using a polaroid camera to take selfies.
The Craft: Legacy is an oddity of a film. It's nowhere near as good as the first movie and white a lot of the 'wokeness' will likely put people off, it's actually not as bad as I had expected it to be. The main characters are decent enough, the link to the first movie while a bit tacked on does mostly work and if by some miracle, it manages to get a follow up of sorts, it has stuff it can work with. Not a total disaster but definitely not a classic.
Rating: 6 out of 10
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