To quote Nelson Muntz upon watching Naked Lunch, after seeing Wicked: For Good, my immediate reaction was, “I can think of at least two things wrong with that title.” And guess what? It isn’t the word “for.” I admit I enjoyed the first film to a degree, which was really the first part of the complete film (the title was changed for the sequel to reinforce the lie that each movie was a standalone), but it was massively overblown in the marketing and wasn’t nearly as quality as the hype train would have led you to believe.
Still, there were things worth recommending. Cynthia Erivo did a fantastic job as Elphaba, as did Jeff Goldblum as the Wizard and Marissa Bode as Nessarose. The designs were interesting, even with the washed-out color palette, most of the songs were well done, especially “The Wizard and I” and the climactic duet of “Defying Gravity.” Despite the shoddy CGI, somehow Peter Dinklage made me care about the plight of a cartoon goat. Suffice to say, there was enough to make me plop down my cash to see how it all wrapped up (eventually; I waited until it was on VOD because I had far greater theatrical and life priorities).
On the whole, the things that were commendable last time out are still there. Unfortunately, they’re in much shorter supply, and the things that were mediocre to downright awful are amplified, particularly the bloated runtime that ultimately proves that this shouldn’t have been split into two movies. You really do have to stretch for positives when one of the biggest high points is the fact that we only had five months of unceasing marketing and corporate tie-ins instead of eight like last time, a result of the marketing budget being reduced from $150 million (equal to each film’s production budget) to a “mere” $90 million. For comparative reference, if this ends up being nominated for Best Picture next week, that’s equal to the entire budget of one of its main competitors, the vastly superior Sinners.
There are two reasons that are easily pointed out as to why this shouldn’t have been a double feature with a year-long wait in between. The first is that, like many Broadway musicals, a lot of the meat of the plot is in the first act, which is what the first movie covered. After the intermission, many shows – even some spectacular ones – are mostly steady or falling action until the show-stopper number and ending. It’s okay to peak with “Defying Gravity,” but you don’t then have an entire other feature-length film that just plods on to the whimper of a finale, especially with this long of an intermission. It’s just, well, boring. The adrenaline rush of the first act conclusion is what’s supposed to carry your energy for the rest of the show. When you have to wait a year in between, that motivation very quickly ebbs away. It certainly did for me.
The second is that, like nearly every other split film in existence, there’s just not enough plot for the second half to justify the running time, so you end up padding the hell out of it. Never mind that whatever momentum you had with the first entry is all but gone unless the powers that be were smart enough to release both parts within a short window (a few months, tops), but you find yourself having to just make up a bunch of bullshit in all installments to make them run for more than an hour. This happened with Mockingjay, Deathly Hallows, the entire Hobbit trilogy, and so many others. The last time this tactic actually worked was with Kill Bill, and only then it’s because a) it was an original work and not an adaptation, b) both parts were released within a reasonable period (six months), and c) Quentin Tarantino designed both films to be distinct in their respective styles, with Vol. 1 being more action-packed and Vol. 2 being more of a slow burn expositional story. Wicked: For Good falls into none of these categories.
We pick things up some time after the events of the first film, though we’re not sure quite how long. In opening narration, Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh continuing to slum it) mentions some nonsense timeframe for the jump forward, but I didn’t understand it, and it likely wouldn’t have made sense anyway. In this span of, let’s say a few years, Nessarose has become Governor of Munchkinland after the death of her father, Galinda (Ariana Grande) is now firmly ensconced as “Glinda the Good,” a mascot for the Wizard’s regime, Elphaba is a fugitive, Boq (Ethan Slater) is Nessa’s assistant/servant, and Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey) is captain of the “Gale Force,” the royal guard and in no way a stupid reference to Dorothy.
The land of Oz is under something akin to Orwellian authoritarian rule, with everything coming from the Emerald City treated as gospel truth, propaganda campaigns against Elphaba, and construction beginning on the Yellow Brick Road, using the formally verbal yet presumably still sentient animals as slave labor. Elphaba swoops in like a badass in the opening to free the beasts towing the machine that lays the bricks, using her magic purely for subterfuge and not to harm others, but that stops no one from making up stories about dangerous attacks and attempted murder. Newspapers and leaflets are even distributed to the citizenry warning them that the “Wicked Witch of the West” can be killed with water, so be diligent and don’t hesitate if you get the opportunity to splash her to death.
A high profile celebrity wedding is arranged between Glinda and Fiyero (something the latter is clearly not enthusiastic about), which infuriates Boq, as apparently he’s kept up his charade of being in love with Nessa this entire time for the sake of getting a shot he never had with Glinda. Okay, a few weeks I can understand. Teenage boys are stupid and hormonal. But clearly several years have passed. How did he never get a freaking clue? Anyway, he tries to leave Nessa’s service, half confessing the truth about how he feels, and she lets him go, only to immediately impose a travel ban for all Munchkins so he can’t leave. Wow, way to ruin all goodwill for the best character in two freaking scenes. I really dug Nessa, and was honestly wondering how she’d become the “Wicked Witch of the East” that eventually gets a house dropped on her. This was… not the explanation I was ever wanting, especially since this story goes to such great lengths to make Elphaba an innocent victim in everything. I mean, practically imprisoning and enslaving your boyfriend because he’s not really your boyfriend? How petty can you get?
Well, it turns out, pretty damn petty, as Fiyero works – at first covertly and then openly – to help Elphaba and eventually sleeps with her, triggering a jealous Glinda to set events in motion that either kill or mutilate people to set up their places in the real Wizard of Oz story. And you thought Morrible and the Wizard were the bad guys. But no, just because she’s cute and privileged, somehow Glinda still gets to be the “good” one when it’s all said and done, the only explanation for her overall behavior being a flashback to a childhood birthday party where a younger version of her (played by Scarlett Spears, and doing more effective acting and character work in this one scene than Grande does in the entirety of both movies) laments that she has no magical powers. Boo freaking hoo! That justifies treating people like shit and being an accessory to murder? Fuck off.
Anyway, eventually the plot of The Wizard of Oz bleeds in, with all the characters playing their roles fairly similarly to the original 1939 film, with a few exceptions. There’s also a strange rebellion with the flying monkeys, and a brief diversion where Elphaba is ready to make a truce with the Wizard for the sake of the animals or some such nonsense. It all leads up to a “twist” ending that you could easily have seen coming if you weren’t comatose for the first five minutes of the first movie.
All in all, there are about 10 total plot points in this thing… and it lasts for 137 minutes. That is not nearly enough story to justify this runtime, or the two-parter framing writ large. The actual musical runs about two and a half hours. You could easily have fit this entire story into one movie lasting the same amount of time without all the dragging and padding, and maybe even extended it to three hours for the sake of world-building. But when you’re approaching five hours total? No. Just no. There’s not nearly enough here.
The first movie was bad enough in this regard, with far too many extended takes and repeat cuts that artificially ballooned several scenes. But here it’s just ridiculous. There’s a sequence early on that takes 10 solid minutes to basically say, “Yeah, Elphaba’s bad now,” when the single unfurling of a caricature poster got the point across just fine. Entire scenes are created out of whole cloth, including for one of the two new songs written for the film, “No Place Like Home.” The other original, “The Girl in the Bubble,” is a tacked-on ballad for Grande that’s actually inserted into the middle of “March of the Witch Hunters” (which is itself just a ripoff of “The Mob Song” from Beauty and the Beast) to bloat that whole affair out. We even go back to the beginning of the first film in the final moments to repeat the entire setup of the story just for an unfunny joke that we’re about to start the whole damn thing over again. It’s just too much, and it’s all style with no substance.
A side effect of this is the fact that the more you harp on certain things for the sake of the runtime, the more scrutiny you invite. Take, for example, the deadliness of water. We know that water melts the witch in the classic story, and it’s hinted at very briefly in the first movie, as a sudden rain shower forces Elphaba and Morrible to conjure a magical umbrella after a single drop burns Elphaba’s hand. Somehow Morrible is able to extrapolate from that and draw a rather extreme conclusion that water can kill her, and uses it as a call to arms. It’s utterly insane to think that’s what would happen given so small a sample size, and even more bullshit to be right about it. Further, later on, Morrible gets the idea to cause a storm as a means to send a message to Elphaba to surrender herself. Given what she’s figured out, how is this any easier than just straight up sending a thunderstorm and having it rain all over Oz until she’s dead? Why do you have to involve others as a scare tactic when the goal is still to either imprison or kill Elphaba? Why risk collateral damage and liability on such an indirect route?
This is the problem with taking too much time to tell the story. In the original, it’s just suspension of disbelief that water kills the witch, especially because the melting is completely accidental. No one knew that would be what took her out, or they’d have done it years before. Here, it’s not only public knowledge that no one seems to want to act on, but some characters take active steps to avoid the easy solution, overcomplicating matters for no reason other than, “We have to get this to over two hours.”
Apart from the glaring issues with the pacing, the rest of the film is competently made, but far from special. Cynthia Erivo continues to do outstanding work, showing us her own interpretation of Elphaba in a way that distinguishes herself from her forebears in the role, and Goldblum is still just as delightfully smarmy as the Wizard. The rest of the cast? Not so much. Slater and Bailey are wasted, Bode is good in what little time she has, Yeoh feels more like a cartoon character than the fucking CGI wetnurse bear that somehow makes a repeat appearance, and once again Grande is just doing an impression of Kristin Chenoweth, only this time, because she gets more screentime, she feels even more desperate for a personality and an acting coach than last time. There’s yet another hard push for her to get the Supporting Actress Oscar after her loss to Zoe Saldaña last year, and for a while, I thought such a crime might come to pass. Thankfully, it looks like it won’t. She’ll still get nominated, but she’s already lost the Critics’ Choice Award to Amy Madigan for Weapons and the Golden Globe to Teyana Taylor for One Battle After Another. It would take whatever the Satanic equivalent of a miracle is for her to come back and take the prize.
The songs are fine, but nothing memorable. I liked “No Good Deed” as a cool villain track, and “Wonderful” is fun because of how cringe it is, but the rest do little for me, including and most especially the quasi title track, “For Good,” which I had already become sick of thanks to all the interstitial AI ads that had phones singing it to each other in robot voices (a repeat of last year’s ad campaign where they sang “Defying Gravity,” which is thankfully so good that not even AI slop could ruin it). As for the two new songs… eh. They were clearly created to extend the film and to cravenly campaign for the Original Song Oscar, much like Chicago invented a song to get nominated and Dreamgirls came up with three to overload the category (hilariously all three lost to “I Need to Wake Up” from An Inconvenient Truth), partly why the Academy changed its rules to limit two nominations for a single film, but they’re both utterly bland and forgettable. That said, if they manage to keep Diane Warren off the final ballot, I’ll never complain about them again.
Everything else is just a more tired repeat of the previous film. The sets are nice, when there are actual sets, but desaturated and ugly when they’re CGI. The costumes are fine but a bit absurd (not in a good way), and the attempts to give Grande a defined chest are just plain laughable. The visual effects are insultingly bad, and the fact that they’re shortlisted for the Oscar just goes to show you how weak the field is this year, especially when everyone knows Avatar will win simply because it’s an Avatar film. None of it is objectively terrible. You can see that Jon M. Chu and company put some effort into it all, but it’s a shadow of what it was last time out, and again, after a year of unnecessary waiting in between releases, it’s yet another bullet point in the argument for why this should have never been two movies.
I’m glad that I saw this through to the end, and while I didn’t care for the resolution, I can at least be happy that I made it. My curiosity has been satisfied, and I’m one step closer to completion for this year’s eventual Oscars field. Did I learn any lessons or be “changed” in any way like the advertising promised? No and no. This was little more than a popcorn film that, like its predecessor, got blown way out of proportion by the dishonest advertising. It’ll still get nominations, because the filmmakers have enough friends in the Academy to get a few pity nods. But it is telling that in the two major ceremonies thus far, it’s come up completely empty, and while critics on the whole loved the first film, this one can barely stay above 60% on Rotten Tomatoes. It’s just another reminder that if you’re going to spend an entire movie setting the table, you’d better give us something juicy to chew on for the back half. Very few two-parters are able to do that, and this one was no different.
Grade: C
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I Actually Paid To See This 