Kenny Ortega’s Hocus Pocus is a tonally inconsistent, narrative mess that relies on childhood nostalgia in order to gloss over its more problematic elements and technical deficiencies. There are vestiges of the darker and more serious, teenage version of this film before it went through countless revisions and became the goofy comedy it is now – leading to strangely incongruent tonal shifts that careen from slapstick comedy in one moment to the gruesome and macabre in the next, all punctuated by sexual comedy that is wildly out-of-place in a children’s film. It also doesn’t help that Ortega shoots the entire film with a flat, ’90s-television banality that only amplifies the paint-by-numbers story beats and the insufferable blandness of our child “hero.” But even worse, the film traffics in horribly sexist tropes, and the “save yourself” ethos embraced by the children toward the end feels very emblematic of the worst aspects of American individualism. I will say that Sarah Jessica Parker is outstanding – it’s too bad the rest of the film isn’t up to snuff.