A couple of disclosures are probably necessary to put this review into some kind of context. First, even as a child I was never a fan of the “Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” the L. Frank Baum novel that was adapted into the immortal 1939 film starring Judy Garland. The story (in either book or movie form) was too simplistic, too shallow in its black-and-white moral lesson about good and evil even for 5- or 6-year-old me. What can I say, I was a precocious kid, and in kind of a troubling sort of way. Ask my mom.
Nevertheless, I’ve always respected the original works (book and movie) as important artifacts of human culture. You don’t have to like the Mona Lisa as a painting (it’s small, and kind of dull when you see it in person), but you have to acknowledge its bigger-than-life importance. Same goes for the Wizard of Oz; it’s that realization that helps one endure seeing the damn movie over and over and over and over again for a period of 5-6 months when one has toddlers in the house. Goddamn, am I glad my kids have grown.
Second, and I realize I am a bit of spoilsport with my attitude, but when it comes to films that are iconic pieces of culture – whether I enjoy them or not – I feel very strongly that they should be left well enough alone, and not be “reimagined” or otherwise redone by others who either lack imagination to come up with something original, or have only just enough imagination to realize they can cash in with something vaguely related to the iconic original. There are exceptions, but they are exceedingly rare. “Wicked: For Good” is not one of them.
The film is the second of two movies adapted from the hit Broadway musical “Wicked,” and the fact that they milked it for two movies when one would do (the original musical was two-and-a-half hours long, with a 15-20 minute intermission) tells you all you need to know about the creators’ real motives. And to be fair to them, it absolutely seems to be working; according to news reports, the movie made something like $226 million over its opening weekend, putting it on par with The Minecraft Movie in terms of popularity.
Sweet Jesus, send the goddamn meteor already.
The first installment of this awkward attempt at retconning the Wizard of Oz, 2024’s “Wicked,” was clumsy, a mule-footed antifascism sermon projected through a filter of CGI so heavy the whole thing felt like a peyote dream. But at least it ended, confusing as its message was: Elphaba (played by Cynthia Erivo) became the Wicked Witch of the West, giving the bumbling dictator The Wizard (played by Jeff Goldblum) and his public cheerleader, the vacuous Glinda (played by Ariana Grande) the villain the Wizard’s fearmongering authoritarian regime needed. So... that was good? Maybe? Who knows. But it was done, and collected its mountain of cash, and the world could move on.
However, director Jon M. Chu and screenwriters Winnie Holzman and Dana Fox said “hold all our beers,” and took everything that was cringe-inducing and overblown about the first film and dialed it up to 11 for this second one. As far as I could tell, apart from being a naked money grab, the main purpose of “Wicked: For Good” from a storytelling perspective was to fill a plot hole no one except people who still write on Tumblr would care about, tying the “reimagined origin story” of “Wicked” to the 1939 classic film. That happened about three-quarters of the way through “Wicked: For Good,” at which point I let out an involuntary groan and said, “Please don’t tell me we now have to sit through the entire Wizard of Oz, god, will this never end?”
Before that happened, however, the audience was treated to an assault on their sensibilities, through a plot of interpersonal drama that would put most soap operas to shame. Oz the World Turns. Glinda’s fiancé, the dashing Prince Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey), jilts her at the altar to run off with his crush, Elphaba; in her forest lair, fully consumed by jungle fever, he tells her he finds her beautiful because “he’s seeing things in a different way.” The origin stories of the source materials’ Tin Man, Cowardly Lion, and Scarecrow are fleshed out in rather gruesome ways – without giving too much away, the Tin Man and Scarecrow are the results of the epidemic of love triangles happening, while the Cowardly Lion is a metaphor for, as near as I could tell, the old Southern ideal of the “happy slave.”
Bigotry and racism are in fact key elements of the story throughout. The Wizard’s regime regards animals, who are smart and can talk and do important jobs (i.e., just like non-white immigrants in America, or, if you really want to go there, Jews in Germany), with suspicion, and first marginalizes them, and then either seeks to imprison or drive them out. People with disabilities, represented by Elphaba’s wheelchair-bound sister Nessarose (played by Marissa Bode), she of the ruby slippers that the OG Dorothy ends up wearing, are bitter and helpless. The dictator of this goofy world, The Wizard, is a bumbling hick who stumbled into his position, but has great power at his disposal so everyone is careful to praise him (sound like anyone we know?), which is made all the more easy by the general population being a herd of dumb sheep. And of course, there is the real power behind the throne, the conniving, brilliantly evil Asian lady, who, just in case the caricature is too subtle, is given the name Madame Morrible; she is played by Michelle Yeoh, who, except perhaps for Goldblum, has more acting talent in her left tit than the rest of this cast has put together, though that is somewhat diminished by her costume featuring a hairstyle that looks like someone set off a grenade in it. One review I read over the weekend speculated that her character was named what she was because Crazy Witch Asian might have been rejected as too obvious.
Fun fact, one of Chu’s prior successes was the hit “Crazy Rich Asians.” Make of that what you will.
The overall impression of “Wicked: For Good” is that it is a film in which the creators were comprehensively trying too hard; trying too hard to make a political message, but not really landing on anything; trying too hard to make music that would sell copies of the soundtrack (while the entire cast, and especially Ms. Grande, are very good singers, the songs were tedious and forgettable); and trying too hard to make a visual extravaganza and instead presenting a film that is either over-exposed or under-exposed throughout, with CGI that looks a good ten years behind the state-of-the-art (what exactly did these people do with their $200 million budget, anyway?).
Finally, and this is something that shouldn’t really need to be brought up in a normal review, but is probably worth addressing because it’s already created a disturbing amount of buzz online: Ariana Grande’s physical appearance in the film is unsettling to say the least. From her visible emaciation, to lip fillers that make the women who hang out at Mar-a-Lago look understated, to her dead, shark-like eyes throughout most of the film – that at least seemed to look more normal later on, so it may have been deliberate, but if so, it was a terrible choice – she simply looks unwell. It’s worrisome, and from a creative standpoint, it’s not something the film’s creators would want as a distraction. Good or bad, they would want people to be talking about their movie, not how their star looks like she needs to see a doctor and eat a good meal as soon as possible.
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