Those who loved last year’s Wicked—the first part of Jon M. Chu’s epic two-part Oztravaganza adapted from the megahit Broadway show—should know that Wicked: For Good is more of the same. The same goes for anyone who hated it. You’ll get more of the same curiously garish-yet-washed-out color scheme, more of the same dishwater-hued songs, more of the same Big Life Lessons tumbling out so rapidly and thoughtlessly that they end up merging into a muddy nonsensical blur. Wicked was such a huge hit that the audience for Wicked: For Good is already cemented in place; this movie needs to be sold to no one. But those with the freedom to pass on it altogether are truly the lucky ones. Life is too short for leaden fanfiction liked Wicked: For Good, an extravagant picture that’s not nearly as imaginative as it thinks it is.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]
Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande return as Elphaba, the perennial outsider with green skin, and Glinda, the favored blonde for whom everything goes swimmingly right, all the time. Elphaba, after realizing she’s become a pawn in the diabolical schemes of the fraudulent Wizard of Oz (Jeff Goldblum) and his sidekick Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh), has taken off for parts unknown. Neither Glinda nor her sometime-boyfriend Fiyero Tigelaar (Jonathan Bailey) know where Elphaba has gone. “She probably doesn’t want to be found,” Glinda reasons, and immediately commences to announce her engagement her Fiyero. That’s news to him—he really prefers Elphaba—but he acquiesces meekly. Glinda, by batting her Bambified eyelashes, always gets her way.
Meanwhile, the exiled Elphaba tries to think of ways to let the good people of Oz know that the Wizard is a fraud. She also takes steps to free the animals he’s allowed to become enslaved. But her good intentions amount to naught: Madame Morrible makes her a scapegoat for every bad thing that happens in Oz. When Elphaba tries to skywrite a message with her broom, “The Wizard lies,” Morrible uses her own magic to change the message to “Oz dies.” Elphaba can’t catch a break, and the movie chugs along dutifully as she tries to redeem herself by always doing the right thing with her powerful magic, even as Glinda grabs all the credit and all the glamour.
So why is Wicked: For Good such a dud? Perhaps even a worse one than its predecessor? There’s nothing inherently wrong with the ideas explored by the original show, which were drawn from Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West—itself inspired by the magnificent, fanciful books written by L. Frank Baum around the turn of the 20th Century, as well as by the legacy of the imaginative and much-adored 1939 film The Wizard of Oz. The core concept behind the Wicked movies is harmless enough: No one is all good or all bad, and sometimes qualities we perceive as bad are merely misreadings or misunderstandings. And if the material had been tweaked and tightened into one two-and-a-half-hour movie, it might have been less exhausting and more exhilarating.
As it is, the two movies combined feel so bloated and padded that there’s no way for them to take flight, either on a broomstick or in a hot-air balloon, and certainly not in a floating soap bubble. The music in Wicked: For Good is so tuneless and meandering it made me yearn for the songs featured in the earlier movie, which seemed dreadful enough at the time but were at least moderately hummable. Objectively, Erivo and Grande are perfectly cast. Both can sing, perhaps much better than they need to, given the sluggish quality of the songs. But this material serves no one. The ostensibly deep messages and themes come at you like baseballs gone wild in a batting cage. Respect animals! Be wary of doing good deeds just for attention! The pretty blond white girl may always seem to get ahead in the world, but not really! Or, actually, maybe yes! By the end of Wicked: For Good, I couldn’t be sure what, exactly, it was trying to say.
There are a few unintentionally amusing moments: As two denizens of Oz get ready to engage in hot Oz sex—off-camera, of course—one of them is wearing a fuzzy gray peignoir that appears to be crocheted with drab, low-quality mohair, certainly the weirdest movie seduction garb of the year. But overall, this is a picture with plenty of gags and almost zero wit. Wicked: For Good will surely be a hit, and its defenders’ cries will be heard throughout the land: “But it’s filled with great lessons for children!” “I loved the stage show as a little girl, and now my little girl loves the movies!” “It made me cry!” Movie experiences are individual and often inexplicable; we love the things we love for reasons we can’t always explain. But I still wish moviegoers could ask for more when it comes to end-of-year, holiday entertainment. Why settle for good when it’s this mediocre?