Oz Has Never Been Less Wonderful

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Last year’s Wicked film was a big, brassy delight. Yes, the director Jon M. Chu’s adaptation of the long-running Broadway musical—itself drawn from a revisionist riff on L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz—had its flaws (why was every outdoor scene so scorchingly overlit?). Yet the smash-hit film’s charms were hard to resist, the kind of sumptuous family fare that Hollywood should be serving up more often. I did detect one glaring issue. Presented in the opening title card was a footnote: the words Part One. Uh-oh. Postponing all the necessary wrap-up to a sequel seemed like leaving a pile of dirty dishes in the sink for tomorrow.

Okay, maybe that second part, Wicked: For Good, isn’t quite that drastic a chore. But it does have a lot of narrative cleanup to do, in large part because of the tricky second half of its source material. Act I of the musical fizzily mixes coming-of-age school comedy with darker fantasy drama; the back half struggles to tie its many plot threads together, and is further hampered by a much weaker set of songs. Splitting the stage show into two parts thus worked wonders for the first movie. Now for Chu and his screenwriters, Winnie Holzman and Dana Fox, the bill has come due. The best I can say about For Good is that its two stars, Cynthia Erivo (as the green-skinned witch Elphaba) and Ariana Grande (her sickeningly sweet friend Glinda), are strong-enough performers to make the most bizarre turns feel functional. But even they can’t keep the film from collapsing under the lightest scrutiny.

Wicked is loosely based on Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel, which imagines an origin myth for the Wicked Witch of the West. In Maguire’s telling, she’s an unfairly maligned victim of prejudice. Wicked: For Good opens as the stage production’s second act does: after Elphaba has fully earned her status as a villain, having defied the dictatorial Wizard (Jeff Goldblum). Elphaba has earned the Wizard’s ire in part thanks to her activism—she’s trying to rally the cause for the land’s talking animals, which are treated like second-class citizens.

[Read: Why the sequel to last year’s brightest film took a dark turn]

The broad, political bent of Maguire’s book is flattened out by the adaptation, as is most of the world-building. The film instead strives to hit the biggest character arcs: The Wizard is getting away with his bad deeds; Elphaba is unjustly pilloried; Glinda, Elphaba’s try-hard, mega-popular former roommate, has joined with the Wizard while quietly chafing against the unfairness of Elphaba’s exile. The dashing Prince Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey) is also playing both sides, leading the Wizard’s royal guard and searching to liberate Elphaba. Nessa (Marissa Bode), Elphaba’s sister, has chosen a darker path: She’s the new ruler of Oz’s Munchkins, whom she treats with growing cruelty.

All of those storylines sound like a lot to reckon with—yet For Good also manages to fit in the entire plot of The Wizard of Oz. The audience meets the Tin Man, the Scarecrow, and the Cowardly Lion, and gets several glimpses of the back of Dorothy’s head. (Thankfully, if for run-time consideration alone, the character is reduced to a nonspeaking role.) Setting For Good against the backdrop of the best-known Oz tale is purposeful; it’s meant to prick the myth of the Wizard as a helpful benefactor, and of Elphaba, the so-called Wicked Witch, as an unquestionably blindly evil adversary. Yet the movie can’t line up the parallel storylines well enough for that endeavor to work. Instead, Elphaba largely protests and rages on the fringes as the land descends into chaos around her. Meanwhile, Glinda repeatedly fails to coax her friend back to the side of the Wizard, whom Elphaba once idolized. Every so often, someone mentions that Dorothy’s still trotting down the Yellow Brick Road.

The characters ultimately seem cordoned off from one another, and the script spins its wheels until the big conclusion. Wicked begins at the story’s end, but For Good seems unsure of how to get there. Efforts are made throughout to beef up the thin narrative, with varying results. The composer Stephen Schwartz wrote two new ballads, one each for Elphaba and Glinda. They’re both filler tracks, unable to advance the already established plot. Some of the musical’s second-act songs do work here, as they do on stage; the jaunty “Wonderful” is a solid showcase for Goldblum’s sinister comic timing, and Erivo delivers the late-stage belter “No Good Deed” with expected aplomb. Even those high points, however, seem static—there’s no lively choreography, and a mountain of fiery CGI action overwhelms what should be showstoppers.

For Good is at its most successful when it’s able to tap into its predecessor’s strengths. Glinda’s dilemma of presenting a face of public propriety while inching toward more rebellious thought is the crux of both Wicked installments, and Grande does the best job of adding some dramatic heft. At the same time, the focus on a more melancholic Glinda emphasizes what is now sorely missing: the first movie’s comic charm, much of which stemmed from Grande’s performance. Without it, the events just come across as unrelentingly dreary.

[Read: The fairy tale we’ve been retelling for 125 years]

Following the beloved source material may have bolstered Part One, but it hamstrings what should be a grand finale. For Good, chained to the Wicked musical’s own failings, cannot expand upon the strangeness of The Wizard of Oz in any novel way. The Wicked saga’s move to the big screen started on a delicious note. Now that it’s over, I’m left waiting to be satisfied.

Article originally published at The Atlantic