My finger slipped and I accidentally purchased "The Craft: Legacy"
Whoops.
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So now I own The Craft: Legacy. Great.
I mean, I still intended to rent it for $19.99, so now owning it for $24.99 isn’t THAT big of a change, but goddammit. I’m never gonna watch this movie again. Or maybe I will, now that it’s in my list of purchased movies? But still. I wanted to maintain the illusion that this was a one-time thing!!!
Might as well talk about The Craft: Legacy, then! 🚨Warning: spoilers ahead.🚨
So for any fan of the original Craft film, the basic plot will seem a little familiar: A teen girl moves to a new town, discovers she has magic powers and joins a coven, and then shit goes nuts. In Legacy, the teen is Lily (Cailee Spaeny), who has moved across the country with her mother (Michelle Monaghan, who looks GREAT) to move in with the mom’s new boyfriend (DAVID DUCHOVNY!!!) and his three sons. Oh, and the movie is written and directed by Zoe Lister-Jones, who I think is just fabulous.
What The Craft: Legacy gets right
The main thing I liked about Legacy is that the danger doesn’t come from the group of teen girls themselves — unlike the original film, their friendship stays strong (except for one brief interlude) from the moment they meet until the end of the film. I always hated that the message of the original Craft was that girls shouldn’t get too powerful, and if they do, they’ll just fight each other. I enjoyed watching the four witches in Legacy build their relationships together and use their powers for fun.
I also appreciated the attempt at updating the plot for modern audiences — one of the coven members is trans, when the girls put a spell on a boy it’s to make him a more enlightened human being rather than humiliating him, and most of the “pranks” they pull are mostly harmless.
The bully-turned-love-interest Timmy (Nicholas Galitzine) is super, super cute and fun, and huge props to Legacy for explicitly making a bisexual man the main love interest. That’s not something we really get to see in these kinds of movies, so I really appreciated that.
Also, Spaeny is very sweet and charming as Lily, and I’m looking forward to seeing her in more things.
What The Craft: Legacy gets wrong
This is a longer list.
First, despite the attempt at diversity and inclusion within the coven itself, Legacy doesn’t seem to care about the individual girls beyond Lily. I just had to look at Wikipedia to find out that the other girls’ names are Frankie, Tabby, and Lourdes. I think at the start of the film, we find out Frankie has a crush on Lily’s sorta-stepbrother, but that doesn’t go anywhere, nor is it ever brought up again. And we learn NOTHING about Tabby and Lourdes, beyond Lourdes being trans. What do they want? What’s their home life like? What do they worry about? Despite all of the original Craft’s problems, that movie did make a point of giving each witch a storyline of her own. If you want your movie to be inclusive, you actually have to include people.
And then even though Lily and Timmy have been flirting for many, many scenes, she decides to put a love spell on him?? Even though the Lily we’ve seen is super responsible and respectful and would never do that. But we need it as a red herring when Timmy appears to die by suicide, so that the other witches think it’s her fault. (Spoiler: it’s not.) He already liked you, Lily!! You were gonna make out ANYWAY, ya goof!
It’s also really hand-waved away that Lily’s mom moved her across the country to move in with a guy she barely knows, and he seems like a dick IMMEDIATELY. What did she see in him? Is she always this impulsive? The movie clearly wants us to think Lily’s mom as a great mom, but she really makes some bad decisions in this film. It’s possible she was under a spell, but the movie doesn’t say this, so maybe she just sucks.
Why does Duchovny’s character have three sons? Two of them are basically the same character, and you’d think the youngest, sensitive one might have something to do, but he doesn’t, really. We barely get to know any of them, let alone how they feel about their complicated relationship with their dad (who by the way, is a motivational speaker about masculinity and does cult-y workshops in his house, so you KNOW he’s a bad guy).
The reveal of Duchovny as the bad guy (because of course he is, Duchovny wouldn’t just play a boring dad type in this movie) is completely underwhelming as well, because I’m just not sure what his goals were. By all MEANS put a spotlight on toxic masculinity, but this part of the story just seems completely tacked on. Oh and then Lily’s mom seems to recover REALLY quickly from finding out that her boyfriend was a murderous warlock who tried to kill her daughter. And how do the three sons feel about their crappy magic dad dying? We never find out.
And OF COURSE we find out Lily is adopted and that her mother is in an institution, and OF COURSE her mother is Nancy from the first film, because we couldn’t do this movie without a bit of a callback to the original. Except that this plot point makes no sense because Legacy makes clear that Lily is a natural witch, but also implies she got her powers from Nancy — but in The Craft, Nancy isn’t a natural witch and she loses her powers by the end of the movie. Yes, I am absolutely thinking too much about this.
Still, PROGRESS!
Basically, this script just needed a few more passes and it would have been really fun. And it was still kinda fun! Even though I did not mean to purchase it and I probably will not watch it again for a long time (if ever), The Craft: Legacy was fun and cute and a good way to spend an hour and a half. Still, please make your trans characters actual characters! (And other movies, please cast more bisexual men.)
That’s all for me today, gorgeous. Talk to you soon.
Love,
Kat
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