From the get-go, the Netflix fantasy epic film “The School for Good and Evil” suffers from an identity crisis.
Is it a heartfelt and majestic youth-oriented magical adventure a la the “Harry Potter” franchise?
Maybe it’s more of a hipster teen coming-of-age comedy/drama set in olden times?
Or perhaps it’ll have more of a “Bridgerton” vibe, with colorful costumes, a wonderfully diverse cast and a host of anachronistic needle drops spicing up the olden times setting?
Here’s the unfortunate news. While the talented and versatile director Paul Feig (“Freaks and Geeks,” “Bridesmaids,” “A Simple Favor”) displays an admirably ambitious reach, and there are some impressive visuals, “The School for Good and Evil” never quite finds its footing. It doesn’t help that the running time is a far-too-long 2 hours and 26 minutes, and the performances range from overly broad caricature work (even for this material) from some big-name stars, to underwhelming portrayals by the younger leads.
Based on the first of a series of popular novels by Soman Chainani, “The School for Good and Evil” opens with a prologue in which two powerful brothers with superpowers engage in a duel in which one of them uses forbidden “blood magic” and the other says, “It’s forbidden for a reason, you can’t control it!” Let’s put a pin in that and enter into the main storyline, with Cate Blanchett’s narrator telling us, “Many years later, in a land far away, a story was unfolding …”
In the land of Gavaldon, which looks like the live-action setting for any number of fairy tales such as “Cinderella” and “Robin Hood,” we meet two bright and delightfully different girls who are shunned by their peers: the cynical Agatha (Sofia Wylie), who lives in a humble cottage next to the cemetery with her mother, who is purported to be a witch, and Agatha’s best friend Sophie (Sophia Anne Caruso), a cheery farm girl with more traditional blonde-princess looks who dreams of venturing outside the provincial boundaries of Galvadon and embarking on great adventures. (When Agatha and Sophie say in unison, “God, I hate this town,” they sound like they’re in a 2022 high school movie.)
Be careful what you wish for. A terrifying bird-monster creature snatches both Sophie and Agatha, whisks them away and drops them at the School for Good and Evil, where, legend has it, all fairy tales begin. (It looks a little bit like a safety school for those who didn’t get into Hogwarts). Funny thing, though: Even though Agatha is the goth-punk type and Sophie has all the makings of a fairy-tale princess, Agatha is dropped off at the pastel-colored, plush and bright Good School, where students are taught to be heroes, while Sophie is dragged into the Bad School, where outcasts and delinquents and goth punk types are schooled in the ways of being, well, bad.
With the first-rate costumes and makeup and production design helping to set the tone, we meet a number of key faculty and administrative personnel, including:
- Charlize Theron’s Lady Lesso, the lead instructor at the School of Evil, who sounds a lot like Theron’s evil queen from “Snow White and the Huntsman” as she purrs lines such as, “Now excuse me, I have fresh villainy to attend to.”
- Kerry Washington’s Professor Dovey, who is upbeat in an almost manic manner as she heads the School of Good.
- Michelle Yeoh’s Professor Anemone, who teaches a class in Beautification and coaches the girls in the right way to smile so they can land a prince.
- Laurence Fishburne’s School Master, who presides over the entire campus and explains to the new students, “The world of story needs great heroes and villains to teach the people of the outside world to make choices, to find their way.”
Turns out a lot of these students are second-generation legacies, e.g, one kid’s dad was the Sheriff of Nottingham, another is the son of King Arthur and Queen Guinevere. That’s a pretty clever concept, and for a while the story skims long nicely, with training sequences and possible forbidden romances, and both Agatha and Sophie trying to explain they’re in the wrong school, and some amusing lines, as when Sophie gets involved in a ferocious, magic-filled battle with a rival student and is about to end her when Lady Lesso reminds her, “Sophie, you’re not allowed to kill anyone until after graduation.” There’s also some genuine risk involved — one student is essentially destroyed after failing at three different tasks — but things become increasingly muddled, and it’s hard to buy into certain transformations, including Sophie’s all-too-quick embrace of the dark side. (The return of one of those brothers from the prologue brings about a twist that should surprise no one.)
Alas, the “Mean Girls” element and the insertion of songs such as Olivia Rodrigo’s “Brutal,” Billie Eilish’s “You Should See Me in a Crowd” and 2WEI’s version of “Toxic” — it feels like we’ve been here before with that style of juxtaposition. Even more unfortunate: Great actors such as Theron and Washington and Fishburne ham it up to the point of distraction, while the younger stars are OK, but not particularly screen-commanding. “The School for Good and Evil” ends with the promise of further chapters, but I’d be OK with closing the book without turning any more pages.
