This film feels like a poorly cribbed term paper. I’m guessing that when writer/director Paul Feig was busy “coming up with The School for Good and Evil,” Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone was playing in the background … and every time he hit a roadblock, he checked out the DVD for inspiration.
It is impossible not to see the parallels between the Potter world within this particular derivative trying to pass itself off as unique. First, there’s a castle [read: “school”] of magic climbing vertically up from a lake below. I’m telling ya, they may as well have named the “good” castle “Hogwarts.” The surrounding forest is full of fantastical danger … as is the castle itself. The eccentric headmaster arbitrarily lets the kids dabble in whatever dangerous activities they see fit to do while the faculty and student constantly draw up sides for pointless competitions. Meanwhile, our protagonist is a school noob, a fish-out-of-water unfamiliar to the world of magic yet constantly wondering if she’s in the right place.
The title makes it sound like one school, but The School for Good and Evil is actually divided into a school for good, with a “good” castle … and a school for evil, with an “evil” castle. How the evil castle is still standing is anyone’s guess – evil tends to destroy, not create. I’m sure such is true in both magical and non-magical worlds. Young children of magical abilities are summoned to be “groomed” for fairy tales. Our “heroine” is Sophie (Sophia Anne Caruso), a village outcast who –despite having a princess complex and a self-obsessive personality—is somehow astonished when she’s deposited into the school of evil.
The pain is doubled when Sophie discovers her reluctant best friend Agatha (Sofia Wylie) has been enrolled in the School of Good.
Huh. You (Sophie) don’t want to be in your school and you (Agatha) don’t want to be in your school … tell me why the world of magic
brought you here, cuz I still don’t understand.
FWIW, Kerry Washington is Dean of the School of Good and Charlize Theron (!) is Dean of the School of Evil. Don’t BOTH of you have better films to be in?
So the film becomes a tiresome exploration of what Hogwarts might look like if it only had two houses. The “good” girls are embarrassingly into princess tropes. The evil kids are embarrassingly into fairy-tale level villainy. I mean, I suppose that’s why they are there, but geez, has none of you heard of subtlety?
And all of the magic and fantasy is simply window dressing for a larger concern regarding headmaster Laurence Fishburne.
This film is a waste of time. For whatever fun you might have with effects and tropes and fantasy, all of this material is handled better in the world of Harry Potter. The School for Good and Evil really and truly feels like the screenwriter interviewed somebody who was trying to recall Harry Potter from memory … but read the books two decades ago and doesn’t remember them well.
In a town where everybody was mean
Lived a girl who wanted to be a queen
So a magical school
Gifted her, with one rule:
“Nobody gets to upstage the Dean”
Rated PG-13, 147 Minutes
Director: Paul Feig
Writer: David Magee, Paul Feig
Genre: The one where you copy something but stop just shy of infringement
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: Netflix Marketing Department
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: JK Rowling scholars
