Twenty-eight years after the original bewitched audiences, Practical Magic 2 lands in theatres on September 10, and the first reviews are already picking apart what's changed.

Deadline's review, published Monday, calls the Susanne Bier-directed sequel "an entertaining day at the movies with mom" but says it plays closer to Harry Potter than to the witchy, slow-burn romance of the 1998 original. That's a pointed comparison, given how much of the first film's cult following rests on its unhurried, character-first storytelling.

The plot picks up where the original left off. Sally Owens (Sandra Bullock) loses her soulmate Gary to the family curse that kills any man who falls for an Owens woman, so she casts a spell wiping her daughters' memories of magic entirely. Cut to 25 years later. Kylie, now played by Joey King instead of Evan Rachel Wood, starts uncovering the family secret after her love interest Gideon, played by Xolo Maridueña, gets badly hurt. She heads to the UK chasing an old book and stranger visions. Sally and her sister Gillian, played again by Nicole Kidman, follow, teaming up with a professor named Ian Wright, played by Lee Pace, to fight whatever's actually behind the curse.

Antonia, the other Owens daughter, is now Maisie Williams instead of Alexandra Artrip. According to Deadline's review, Williams and Kidman get sidelined for most of the runtime, with no independent storylines of their own, a departure from Alice Hoffman's source novel The Book of Magic, which gives both women arcs of their own. Deadline also points out that Maridueña spends much of the film in a coma, which undercuts the childhood-sweetheart backstory his character needs to make the stakes land.

The original film's Owens family house, built as a shell on San Juan Island for the 1998 movie, has been rebuilt for the sequel, this time in the UK. Deadline notes it barely features, just 15 minutes of screen time, before the story shifts to the English countryside.

Bullock has reportedly talked about wanting to "pass the torch" to a next generation of witches, which would suggest a trilogy-closing third film is already on the studio's mind. Deadline's reviewer, for what it's worth, says they'd rather see Warner Bros. Go backward instead, adapting Hoffman's prequel novels The Rules of Magic and Magic Lessons, which dig into the Owens family's 1960s and 1600s roots.

If you're planning to catch the sequel this weekend and haven't revisited the original, TheWrap reports Practical Magic is streaming now on HBO Max, and also available through TNT, TBS and TruTV for anyone with cable log-ins. No streaming date has been set for the sequel yet. As a Warner Bros. Release, it's expected to land on HBO Max eventually, but for now it's theatres only.

Whether Practical Magic 2 does enough business to justify that third installment is the real question hanging over opening weekend.