ased on Soman Chainani's best-selling children’s book series, The School for Good and Evil, is about just that.The world is divided into two clear halves, the good and the evil. A mash up of Harry Potter and Descendants, the two-and-a-half hour movie is a tad overwhelming, considering the magical adventure is for 9-12 year olds.

Paul Feig’s latest offering is once again about female friendship, with all its complications, quite similar to Bridesmaids, The Heat, and A Simple Favour. With two extremely opposing characters, who are also teenage best friends, Sophie and Agatha, looking out for each other, the movie pretty much happens in the school, where all the lost children go where boys and girls are trained to be fairy tale heroes (evers) and villains (nevers).

The petite Sophie(Sophia Anne Caruso) is a blonde Cinderella, with her pretty dresses, woodland creatures, glass slippers, princes and princesses; everything’s all flowers, makeup and curtsies, and devotion to all things good. She knows she’ll ace School for Good. Meanwhile,the wild-haired Agatha (Sofia Wylie), with her shapeless black frocks, a wicked pet catcalled Reaper, and aversion to nearly everyone, seems a natural fit for the School for Evil, which is featured permanently by the fog-coated tower, dark spell-casters and other villains-to-be dining on glop between ugliness classes.

However, the tide turns when the girls are kidnapped and flounced into the Endless Woods, a magical cliff-side academy, they find their roles reversed. Sophie is dumped in the School for Evil to tackle with Uglification, Death Curses and Henchmen Training, while Agatha is thrust into the School for Good, amongst handsome princes and fair maidens for lessons in Princess Etiquette and Animal Communication. Both of them assume that it must’ve been a mistake and both struggle to switch places and escape but to no avail. Sophie and Agatha have trouble when all of their escape attempts are thwarted by the schools’ tight security system. But then they begin to reveal their true, authentic selves.

With various twists and sub-plots, the movie is engaging but not absolutely nail-biting. Peppered with several cultural figures like Prince Charming, King Arthur and the Sheriff of Nottingham, the movie sticks to the mythological aura around a somewhat gothic Hogwarts and fairytale magical creatures.

Although Agatha fails most of her lessons, she discovers a powerful ability to hear and grant wishes, something that can only come from a pure Good heart. On the other hand, the apparently good Sophie too begins to show her true colours. Both of them undergo subtle but significant changes.

With various twists and sub-plots, the movie is engaging but not absolutely nail-biting. Peppered with several cultural figures like Prince Charming, King Arthur and the Sheriff of Nottingham, the movie sticks to the mythological aura around a somewhat gothic Hogwarts and fairytale magical creatures.

The dialogue is snarky in a way that’s both archaic and au courant, as the bond between the two feels pretty real. A visually sumptuous fantasy, needless to say, the costume department gets extra brownie points with clothes in dazzling glamour, an area that the director would never compromise on.

Amongst all the noise and chaos of hurled fireballs, swirls of blood and duels with glowing swords, the movie aims to upend familiar tropes and unearth some useful truths – like all of our local schools face too. The popular group at the good school is packed with mean girls, while the weirdoes and misfits at the bad school are genuinely loyal and kind.

Chainani wrote a series of these books, where the author had much more time and space to expand on the elements and characters and backstories. However, the movie seemed fleeting in such terms, which is probably why it had to be stretched that long. Perhaps, a series would’ve sufficed? I think this book also deserved a Disney treatment.

The writer is a freelance journalist based in Karachi