The School for Good and Evil review: Dressed up big and fancy to go nowhere nice

2/5

STORY: Even in Paul Beig's shamelessly borrowed fairy-tale rendition The School for Good and Evil—the ideas and visuals of which have the name Harry Potter sprinkled all over it—bullies trouble belles. Livid, best friends Agatha (Sofia Wylie) and Sophie (Sophia Anne Caruso) decide to skip town and start life afresh ... The fight, the moral dilemma: it's all classic fantasy moves, minus the excitement of seeing something fresh and innovative on screen.

REVIEW: To pluck an iconic franchise out of the pages of cinematic history and giving it an unflattering spin, is always a terrible (TERRIBLE!) idea. Case in point: Paul Beig's The School for Good and Evil. Staying true to the genre, and what some of the founding members of it have taught us in the past, Beig retains the aesthetic value for familiarity but flexes his creative muscle to a bare minimum: the story just doesn't stick. 

The film opens to two giggly teenagers conjuring up plans; naively, to flee their restrictive town of Gavaldon and head towards greener pastures, before it finally graduates (or demotes?) to an underlying sense of competition between both the friends: one dark-skinned and hence doomed for life, Agatha the Witch, and the other light and sparkling and thus, labelled a princess. At a time when even classic (Cinderella) fairy tales are making drastic changes to their source material to blend in with today's liberal crowd, this seemed like a misfire of an epic proportion by Netflix.

Moving on: in the schools for good and evil, the once-thick-as-thieves Agatha and Sophie are made to battle it out and one of them must emerge victorious perhaps for the simple reason that the film has to make some sense. It doesn't. 

What starts off as a barrage of cliched themes and subplots quickly turns into a lesson on inclusivity, with character actors of various hues popping in and out of scenes at odd times who contribute nothing to the narrative whatsoever. 

This marriage between two extreme ends of the fairy-tale subgenre is not even the film's lowest point: it is the sheer pointlessness of the script itself, and eventually the very existence of the film, that makes one wonder what on Earth was the crew thinking. If it was to refresh our memories; no thank you! 

Sticking to his self-imposed mandate of breaking the barriers of colourism through offbeat casting, Paul Beig brings in a confident Kerry Washington to play the dean of the School for Good. For the evil witches, it is of course a white actor who takes on the job: an-always marvellous Charlize Theron.

The School for Good and Evil has a young and lovely star cast, is grander than the grandest of fantasy films we have watched so far (again, only visually), but it seems to have forgotten to carry that one element to set which makes this genre stand out from the rest—a magic wand that actually works. 

VERDICT: Nah!