Movie Review: 'The Craft Legacy' Improves on the Original

The Craft Legacy is a rare sequel that improves on the original. 1996’s The Craft was a solid look at teenage female empowerment and friendship that carried some very 90’s values. The Craft Legacy reflects how women’s empowerment has evolved and it’s a solid improvement on an original that wasn’t bad but does benefit from an updated perspective. Directed by Zoe Lister-Jones, The Craft Legacy is, for lack of a better term, ‘woke’ and it contains some of the best broad strokes of that term.

The Craft Legacy stars Cailee Spaeny as Lily, a lonely teenage girl who is moving with her mom (Michelle Monaghan) to a new city where they will live with mom’s new boyfriend, Adam (David Duchovny), and his three sons. Lily doesn’t make friends easily and her first day at school certainly doesn’t get off to a great start. Poor Lily suffers a humiliating moment that is rescued when three new friends appear to offer much needed support.

The three new friends are Frankie (Gideon Adlon), Tabby (Lovie Simone and Lourdes (Zoey Luna). The three have been practicing magic together for some time while waiting for the fourth member of their coven to emerge. They first notice Lily because of a necklace she wears, given to her by her mother, that they recognize as pagan. Later, when Lily is being harassed by a bully named Timmy (Nicholas Galitzine), Lily shows off the powers she never knew she had, amplified by that of her three new friends.

Reluctantly and apprehensively, Lily joins the coven and begins practicing witchcraft. First thing on the agenda, a little payback on Timmy. The coven comes up with an ingeniously modern revenge, they turn Timmy ‘woke.’ Using a spell they crafted themselves, the coven turns Timmy from a predatory misogynistic teenager into a fully woke, politically active, kind and thoughtful, ideal teenage mate. But just how much of Timmy is from their spell and how much of this was already inside him is a question.

I will stop the plot description there as The Craft Legacy has a few tricks and turns to show off as the story progresses. David Duchovny for one, is a character full of surprises. Duchovny’s Adam is a men’s rights activist. He preaches male strength and dominance and appears to have a reputation similar to that of Jordan Peterson, the famed speaker and author who gained fame by being banned from many college campuses for his misogynistic and anti-trans and LGBTQ beliefs.

Duchovny relishes the role but is he the big bad in the movie? That’s one way in which director Zoe Lister-Jones toys with you, throwing in red herrings and references to the original movie that helps to keep you guessing. That’s not to say that The Craft Legacy is incredibly well-crafted. The Craft Legacy has more than a few stumbles and pitfalls. There are several confounding scenes in the movie, unexplained motivations, and contrived scenes that are only intended to further the plot rather adhere to the established logic of the story.

And yet, I didn’t mind the flaws of The Craft Legacy all that much. That’s largely due to the performances of Cailee Spaeny and Nicholas Galitzine who have a charming chemistry. After the coven turns Galitzine’s Timmy into a woke, feminist, trans-rights activist, teenager, he becomes a really likable and sympathetic character. I was surprised to find myself rooting for Timmy after his woke conversion and when he and Lily begin a tentative romance and he begins to reveal some deep truths about himself, I was fully won over by The Craft Legacy.

The other thing I really enjoyed in The Craft Legacy is how the movie avoids the pitfalls of turning all the young women against each other. I don’t want to spoil anything, but the dynamic between these four young woman is quite different from the original which spent the final act making sure there was little joy left in the central female friendship among the wannabe witches coven and it made for a rather dissatisfying and rote ending that reinforced negative stereotypes about female friendship.

The Craft Legacy is available via video on demand services on October 28th, just in time for Halloween.