Harry Potter wizard dust blankets “The School for Good and Evil.” Director Paul Feig and company deserve some extra credit, though, for trying to make this young adultfantasy about competing fairy-tale academies more than just magical mayhem and killer ball gowns.
Adapted from Soman Chainani’s best-selling novel, the lushly produced Netflix movie benefits from being the latest of Feig’s female buddy films. Like “Bridesmaids,” “The Heat,” “A Simple Favor” and even the uneven “Ghostbusters” reboot, “School” makes any girl-power messages it pushes feel hard-fought, messy and sometimes funny, just like real-life struggles and friendships.
This dovetails nicely with the movie’s other key theme, that defining right and wrong isn’t as simple as our bedtime stories (or good guy vs. bad guy movies) would have us think.
The solid ideas don’t gel until halfway through this rather long narrative, but这是一个明显的缓解青少年冷笑ing, hambone acting and standard Hollywood “wonderment” that dominate the first hour or so. The lines get better as the stakes rise, too.
Sophie (Sophia Anne Caruso) and Agatha (Sofia Wylie) are BFF outcasts in their medieval village of Gavaldon. Sophieis apparently an orphan and Aggie’s momis a wannabe witch, but perhaps their worst transgression is that they read.
This makes owning the local oafs easy, but Sophie still thinks she ought to be a princess by virtue of her blondness.
When a giant skeleton bird whisks the girls off to Castle Campus Land, Sophieis thrilled and edgier Aggieis not. They’re both horrified, though, when Aggieis deposited in the School for Good and Sophieis dunked at the School for Evil’s doorstep.
The twin learning establishments, which for eons have trained youths for the hero or villain templates that bedtime stories are based on, don’t acknowledge mistakes. Therefore, neither Evil headmistress Lady Lesso (Charlize Theron in a red fright wig and matching attitude) nor Good principal Professor Dovey (Kerry Washington, creepy with positivity), want to hear the new girls’ complaints. So Sophie must deal with a coven ofgoth classmates who may not be as awful as they look, while Aggie is ostracized by the mean girls training for their happy-ever-after futures. To make things worse, neither cohort likes readers any more than the peasants back home did.
Through lots of weird ceremonies, intermural competitions, complicated sorcery,exhausting lore and strange creature encounters, the girls lose and find one another, as well as themselves. They also meet interested boys — Jamie Flatters is very good as Tedros, the somewhat self-aware son of King Arthur; Kit Young has an appropriately malevolent charisma as blood magic maven Rafal — and must save the universe or something. Laurence Fishburne, Michelle Yeoh and Cate Blanchett’s voice as a narrating quill pen perform credible auditions for the next round of Hogwarts casting.
Feig sometimes loses narrative and emotional threads amidst all the wickedness and whimsy, but it’s a miracle that he gets as much feeling and story sense across as he does. There’s one telling moment when the fourth wall is breached, “She-Hulk” style, as if to acknowledge that this too good-looking, mythical mashing-up probably shouldn’t be indulged so much.
The real magic of “School”resides in its stars. Caruso loses Sophie’s moral direction in deliciously fun yet behaviorally alarming ways. Wylie finds Aggie’s righteousness without damaging the character’s cunning intellect; a scene involving “wish fish” has no business being as moving as Wylie makes it. Together, the young actors take this project beyond good and evil, into the realm of something real.
L“The School for Good and Evil”:幻想。索菲娅主演的安妮•卡鲁索索非亚威利,Charlize Theron and Kerry Washington. Directed by Paul Feig. (PG-13. 147 minutes.) Available to stream on Netflix starting Wednesday, Oct. 19.