The School for Good and Evil (2022)

Everybody wants to be the next Harry Potter. Even the makers of Harry Potter want to find the next Harry Potter and can't seem to even with their Fantastic Beasts franchise. But some are more transparent than others, the most egregiously copy cat are the "fantastic school" stories like this or Percy Jackson or countless others where a rather normal, usually bullied kid gets whisked off to a school for some sort of fantastical study where they discover they are something special and become the hero they were born to be. It's all the same. Sure it's a fantasy many children have, therefore the appeal. But that doesn't stop it from being repetitive. 

Certainly some do it better than others. The film version of Good and Evil is not really one of those despite its star power. I can't comment on whether the source material is less a series of predictable cliches than the film but I can say the film telegraphs everything it is doing and feels like the sort of morality play that we've heard one thousand times before. What? The "good" girl gets sent to the school of Evil and the girl seen as "bad" gets sent to the school of Good because perhaps what society thinks of as good and evil are often nor grounded in true morality? Wow that's original and groundbreaking!! You mean they're going to suffer through supposed lessons on good and bad qualities only to find through experience what real goodness is?? I never would have guessed!

The film really does lean into the simplest and most cliched versions of what good and evil means. And yes we get the rather obvious point that good and evil are not simple, but even as we get to this revelation the the versions of good and evil we get remain over simplified and culturally reinforcing. There are no revelations of nuance and subtlety. Everything is as black and white as one would expect. 

And The School for Good and Evil film feels cheap. This isn't a film that signals it is something taking itself seriously enough for us to invest in it as an ongoing series with characters three dimensional enough for us to care about and get attached to. Instead it feels like a Disney Channel movie referring to movies far greater than itself. 

The School For Good and Evil

Starring: Sophia Wylie, Sophia Anne Caruso, Kerry Washington, Charlize Theron, Patti LuPone, Laurence Fishburne, Michelle Yeoh, Jamie Flatters, Kit Young, Peter Seafinowicz, Ally Cubb, Cate Blanchett  

Director: Paul Fieg

Writers: David Magee, Paul Figg