Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The School for Good and Evil’ on Netflix, a Crushingly Overbusy ‘Harry Potter’ Ripoff

The School for Good and Evil is Netflix’s latest franchise hopeful, and you might consider that a warning. Its jumping-off point is Soman Chainani’s bestselling 2013 YA fantasy novel, which has sold three million copies and inspired five subsequent books ripe for movie-sequel adaptations. Translation: don’t believe, even for a second, that execs and bean counters aimed for a one-and-done. Bridesmaids and Ghostbusters (2016 reboot) director/Freaks and Geeks creator Paul Feig takes the helm for this fairy-tale-inspired witches-and-princesses-and-other-assorted-crap saga starring Sophia Anne Caruso and Sofia Wyle as new students at the thing in the title. Are you bored yet? If not, you probably will be soon.

THE SCHOOL FOR GOOD AND EVIL: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Once upon a you know, in a far-off land somewhere, two brothers, one in a red coat and one in a blue coat, sparred with their magic swords – but the sparring soon became real hardcore fighting, and the red coat died. There’s some exposition in this scene, something about Forbidden Blood Magic, and there will be exposition in pretty much every scene from here on out, large chunks of it narrated by Cate Blanchett, so I hope you’re taking notes and not eating popcorn like a total rube. Elsewhere, in a medieval-ish time later than the once-upon time from the previous scene, two teenage girls live in the bullshit town of Gavaldon. Sophie (Caruso) has dreams of being a glass-slippered princess like whatsername, except her parents and family are all grubby and they suck. Her best pal Agatha (Wyle) wants to be a witch like her dear mother, although whether they’re nice witches or nasty witches isn’t clear; is there such a thing as in-betweener witches? Both are smart and like to read books, which makes them outcasts among their idiot go-nowhere peers and townsfolk, who sneer at them like the judgmental buttheads they are.

One day Sophie wishes upon a wishing tree to GTFO, and what happens is, a giant Skeksis bird monster swoops down and drops them at the School for Good and Evil, which Blanchett sez is “where every good fairy tale begins.” But something goes wrong when the bird monster drops wannabe-princess Sophie at the evil half of the school, which is not called Slytherin, and Agatha at the good half, which you wouldn’t dare call Gryffindor. The evil students, led by Lady Lesso (Charlize Theron), are called Nevers, and they learn to be the antagos of all the stories you know; we meet one guy who’s the son of Captain Hook, and he’s played by the son of Nick Cave, which is hella apt. The good students, led by Prof. Dovey (Kerry Washington), are the Evers, and they’ll be the protags; one poor kid is Gregor Charming, who sure as hell seems doomed to live in the shadow of his old man. And everything is overseen by the School Master (Laurence Fishburne), the blue-coated survivor from the movie’s opening array of mediocre special effects.

What follows is an epic assemblage of Too Many Characters populating episodes that would just absolutely love it if you called them a “plot.” Agatha resists princess training, what with its giganto-ballgowns and feminine-smiling lessons; she banters with the king of the princes, Tedros (Jamie Flatters), who has the personality of a peen hammer, but he carries Excalibur and has great hair and eventually becomes a bigger plot cog. Sophie resists bad person training, what with its goth fishnets and lack of quality hair-care products. Their classes include Uglification and Beautification, and teachers range from mottled rottentooths to Underused Michelle Yeohs. Funny how both schools have Mean Girls, though, which is an unwritten law of Hollywood: No school without Mean Girls shall exist in a movie lest it be banished to the darkest cobwebbed corners of Crackle.

It soon becomes prevalent that no moral in-betweens exist at the School for Good and Evil, and Sophie and Agatha’s inability to conform to such monochromatic standards exposes that previously unacknowledged truth. See, they’re characters of destiny, existing to enact change, which specifically involves uncovering the real, true, heavy-duty evil that lurks in the background of the first hundred or so episodic scenes that yearn to be a plot, and emerges in the final seven-dozen-odd episodic scenes that yearn to be a plot. There’s a big climactic moment with all kind of violence that occurs with 30 minutes still to go as the movie works its way to an overworked, worked-up conclusion that determines Sophie and Agatha’s fate and/or status for the sequel, if one should arise, although holding your breath in anticipation for it seems like a foolish endeavor.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Lazily ripped-off Harry Potterisms blur together with the würst of the early 2010s fairy-tale riffs, including, but not limited to, the likes of Red Riding Hood and Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters, but especially the egregious bad-whiff of The Huntsman: Winter’s War, which also featured the gross misuse of Charlize Theron.

Performance Worth Watching: Wylie (High School Musical: The Musical: The Series) and Caruso (Broadway’s Beetlejuice musical) show potential, but being buried under all this visual and narrative bric-a-brac is not the ideal mainstream-movie introduction to their talents.

Memorable Dialogue: School Master Fishburne dishes out this unintentionally ironic bit of meta-commentary: “There are no mistakes in the School for Good and Evil.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: So this school is just begging to be toppled, what with all its old-fashioned ideas about good and evil and gender roles, and its endless avalanche of rules restricting one from defying its dead-set traditions; it’ll take the arrival of a couple nonconformist wrecking balls to flush out the corrupt subtext of the place and bring about much-needed change. Admittedly, this isn’t a terrible basis for a fantasy saga, but here comes the big but: But The School for Good and Evil is such an emotionally and intellectually underwhelming presentation of conceptually overwhelming everythingness, watching it is like enduring a pummeling hailstorm of kitchen sinks. The onslaught of quasi-zany characters, chintzy CGI whirlwinds, cornball voiceover narration, reams of exposition, romantic quiverings, from-Grimm-to-Disney references, putty goblin noses, costumes costumes everywhere costumes, and monsters ranging from fairies to wolf-headed guards to man-gnomes to a smoke-being with red glowing Uncle Boonmee eyes to randomly conjured flaming Satanic attack-demons bested by similarly randomly conjured swarms of angry bees – to say it’s too much is just not enough, and I haven’t even mentioned the Knight’s Tale-ish anachronistic pop songs by the likes of Billie Eilish and Olivia Rodrigo, which to my relatively untrained ear, all sounded like ethereal Lana Del Rey knockoffs. (Silly me, I guess.)

Such headache-inducing clogged-sinus storytelling is, as you may know, emblematic of a greater purpose than your mere entertainment. It’s all about Establishing the Franchise, because the thought of a standalone adventure just will not do. A movie’s final shot is often its final word, and it’s telling that this one uses that moment to tease a sequel. Which seems audacious, because most anyone who endures it will be wishing for less, not more.

It’s frustrating to see Feig cobble together piecemeal an epic with laggard pacing, no tonal or visual distinction, and DOA comedic sensibilities. It’s a bland fantasy goo that tends to present and discard ideas expeditiously – the identity struggle of Prince Charming’s son, for example, or the satirical skewering of feminine conventions (the Good school for princesses is, for someone like Agatha, the finishing school from hell), or the potentially compelling twisty true-love’s-kiss subplot that’s punted and fumbled and half-assed and rendered all but meaningless by the time it’s resolved, 130-odd minutes into this stultifying mess. The movie isn’t interested in challenging its audience; it’d rather exploit such slapash topicality, making it just one of far too many ingredients in a content stew that’s bereft of originality and coherent storytelling. It’s just more cynically manufactured Shit 4 Teenz, and god knows we don’t need any more of that.

Our Call: SKIP IT. One interesting notion presented within the School for Evil asserts that not caring about anything grants a person freedom. I hereby recommend that you enjoy the mighty liberation you’ll feel by not giving a single damn about The School for Good and Evil.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.