The story is centred on the fairy-tale-obsessed Sophie (Sophia Anne Caruso) and her tomboy best-friend, Agatha (Sofia Wylie), as they are transplanted from the mundane, medieval town of Gavaldon, into the School of Good and Evil - a training ground for the next generation of heroes and villains. Sophie, with her long golden hair, ends up on the Evil side and Agatha on the Good, causing a badly written descent into evil on Sophie’s part whilst Agatha fights to save her from herself and the manipulation of the over-styled and underwhelming villain, Rafal (Kit Young in red eye-shadow).
Indeed, the School’s design (not completely atrocious) appears to borrow a lot from the 'Harry Potter' franchise, with a great hall, lake-side classes and a clear binary of good and evil - a Hogwarts of two houses: Mean Girl and Emo. However, this is where the similarities between the franchises stop. Where Harry Potter manages to capture the awe and wonder of a magical world, the School of Good and Evil has completely lost this during the cinematic process as actual classes appear to be side-lined in the film with Michelle Yeoh (Everything Everywhere All At Once, Crazy Rich Asians, Tomorrow Never Dies), Mark Heap (Friday Night Dinner, Stardust, Green Wing) and Rob Delaney (The Hustle, Deadpool 2, Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning - Part One) wasted on the Professors’ inconsequential roles. World-building and the detail of school life are sacrificed in favour of love-triangles and make-overs, converting cliché to cringe and often reinforcing negative gender stereotypes due to clumsy writing and poor measure of plot development.
However, the apparent lack of education does not stop the students from unlocking (badly-animated) powerful magic which tear the schools apart as Sophie descends into a haglike form of true evil (Spoilers!). Sophie’s abrupt, poorly-written character arc is revealed as the fault of Rafal - the fore-father of all evil, previously disguised as the School-master (Laurence Fishburne). After morphing into his younger form, Rafal fulfils his master plan by kissing Sophie, thereby triggering the destruction of the fairy-tale world via the power of pedophilia. However, his evil plan is stopped by Agatha and Sophie as they share a platonic true love’s kiss, protecting the world from the tyranny of a nonce. After all, they are just really good galpals that have not spent the entire 147 minutes fighting to be reunited, and have now achieved their happily-ever-after together - only platonically, of course.
All in all, this has been an overwhelmingly hetero-centric narrative that once again fails to translate the magic of the YA novel to the big screen - enjoyable only in the brain-dead sense.