The School for Good and Evil

Best friends Sophie and Agatha find themselves on opposing sides when they are sent to competing enchanted schools where aspiring young heroes and villains are trained to join the battle between good and evil.

The School for Good and Evil was obviously not made with me in mind, and for all I know the YA/Tumblr crowd loves this way too long “Bridgerton meets Harry Potter” Netflix film, based on a best-selling series of novels, that is somehow not only written and directed by Paul Feig, but also stars Charlize Theron, Kerry Washington, Cate Blanchett, Laurence Fishburne, and Michelle Yeoh, so it’s probably best to look at my response here as coming from a definite outsider...

But that having been said, seriously, at over 2 and half hours…

This film is way too long.

In a nutshell, two teenage girls, the bestest of best friends, despite being “extremely different” from one another, both live in a shitty little fairytale land of small-minded peasants. Sophie is basically Cinderella pre-ball, and Agatha wears pants and has big hair, so people think she’s a witch. They’re outcasts, y’see, and as a result, they find each other. After a bit too much foot-dragging brouhaha, they both end up at a pair of magic schools on opposite sides of a river gorge, connected by a single bridge. There are the titular schools of Good and Evil. The School for Good looks like a wedding cake’s wet dream, and the School for Evil is Goth Hogwarts. Together, they are the fount of all fairy tales, myths, and legends, so the students are all off-brand Disney princes/princesses and/or the children of fairy tale bad guys, but never in a trademark infringement kind of way that could be legally actionable.

The film does do a potentially interesting thing by sending Sophie, the blonde Cinderella, to the Evil School, and Agatha, the big-haired, pants-wearing witch, to the Good School. Perhaps more surprisingly, and disappointingly, the film sets up, but then never digs into the idea of the evils of prejudice, not even in a “kid movie” kind of way. Sure, there’s some attempts to subvert some tropes and to speak some truths, but they’re mostly half-hearted efforts that are quickly set aside for some very chaste teenage kissy-face shenanigans. Otherwise, there’s some talk of The One and Destiny and Hidden Evil, blah, blah, blah, but it’s all pretty rote, never actually “good” but also never really “evil” either.

See what I did there?

But like I said… this film obviously wasn’t made for me, but even then, it just doesn’t seem like it will be a huge hit with kids either. It doesn’t often much and delivers less. The book is probably better. I will say that Kerry Washington and Charlize Theron, as the Good and Evil Headmistresses respectively, obviously had a blast vamping and strutting about, and playing off each other, and for a brief moment at least, that is almost worth the price of admission.

But in the end, The School for Good and Evil is just waaaay too long.