I’ve been quite looking forward to this movie, after seeing the trailer a couple of weeks ago. I was familiar with Sophia Anne Caruso from her work in the Broadway musical Beetlejuice. When she suddenly left, there was a lot of speculation about why. I found my answer to that question when I saw her in the trailer. Good for her!

Now I wasn’t particularly optimistic about The School for Good and Evil. It seems to have been based on a book, but I hadn’t heard of it. I am familiar with Disney’s Descendants movies, in which the kids of some Disney villains go to a school for princes and princesses. I really enjoyed those movies, but they are batshit insane. It’s a theme you really can’t play too straight, as there are too many questions that come up while watching. Why are the “good” kids not actually nice? How can a society of villains work, if all they do is treat each other badly? The answer, of course, is that there is no such thing as good and evil. However, having your movie end with that moral is like having your movie end with the revelation that the earth is round. Yeah. We know.

Because of all this, I wasn’t expecting to enjoy this movie very much, but I was pleasantly surprised. It’s not… good? But for me, it managed to find the right tone. It’s not extremely silly, but it also knows that it’s not some kind of cinematic masterpiece. The costumes are fun and the story is relatively simple. It’s a nice little romp through a fantasy land that you know is going to end well. None of the characters are particularly memorable, the writing is average and it’s very cliché in many ways. But who cares! Not every movie has to be a masterpiece to be enjoyable.

Now can anybody explain to me why anyone would want to date Teddy??