Ding Dong: The ‘Wicked’ pitch is dead in an underwhelming sequel to last year’s hit musical
“Wicked: For Good” — 2 stars
Just in time for Thanksgiving, Universal Pictures presents us with an overstuffed turkey of a musical sequel.
It’s still a tasty treat for the eyes, and it showcases the ace performance skills of Ariana Grande the way last year’s box office smash “Wicked” showcased those of her co-star Cynthia Erivo.
Even so, the lagging 2-hour-18-minute “Wicked: For Good” fails to supply the joyful, engaging impact of the first movie, which admittedly came loaded up with the most memorable songs and charismatic encounters from the onstage original.
Seriously, how could any sequel hope to follow the visually and musically explosive “Defying Gravity” capping last year’s release?
When Bob Fosse adapted Broadway’s classic integrated musical “Cabaret” into an Oscar-winning, classic backstage musical movie, he wisely cut popular but unnecessary songs and subplots.
The underwhelming “For Good” sidelines the zippy fun that permeated its predecessor with convoluted details about the characters and their motivations, suggesting that the screenwriters (Winnie Holzman and Dana Fox) might have benefited from viewing “Cabaret” as a model of verbal economy.
“For Good,” again directed by Jon M. Chu, begins when Dorothy Gale has yet to arrive in Oz, and when she does, we never actually see her face or hear her voice. Her story has already been told in the 1939 film adaptation “The Wizard of Oz,” starring Judy Garland, based on Frank L. Baum’s 1900 fantasy novel “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.”
Cho’s film — adapted from the Tony-winning Broadway musical, adapted from Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel “Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West” — properly treats Dorothy as a minor figure in the story all about the tested friendship between the witches of the North and West.
The sequel takes up in Emerald City, where the green witch Elphaba (Erivo) has been banished after revealing the duplicitous and dictatorial nature of the not-so-wonderful Wizard (reprised by Jeff Goldblum).
Now the outlawed Wicked Witch of the West, Erivo juxtaposes innate sadness with fierce conviction as a broomstick avenger attacking Emerald City employees constructing the Yellow Brick Road in her unwanted quest to stand against injustice and the increasing authoritarian rule instituted by the Wizard and his Roy Cohn-like mentor Madame Morrible (a miscast Michelle Yeoh).
(Hey, if Morrible possesses awesome magic powers — such as commanding the weather like the MCU’s Storm — why doesn’t she use them instead of relying on her tentative and insecure Wizard to get her way?)
Meanwhile, Grande quietly grows Glinda’s self-centered bubblehead into a political standard-bearer for the positive power of good in Oz, even though she knows that Morrible is manipulating her, even down to making sure she marries a proper man, Prince Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey).
Here, Bailey seems to be on a desperate search for last year’s character, a super charismatically cool aristocrat with a comic twinkle in his eye. This Fiyero looks confused, lost and uncomfortable, especially in awkward scenes where he uses a pistol and threatens to kill people.
This rattled Fiyero also participates in the movie’s least-convincing scene when he and Elphaba perform the dance of the wild bunnies to cement a rushed romance.
An obvious hook in “For Good” turns out to be how cleverly the story tells the surprising — even shocking — ways that the Scarecrow, Tin Man and Cowardly Lion came to be and fit into the reimagined Oz narrative.
But nothing will probably be as shocking as the upcoming, presumably R-rated horror films based on Baum’s characters, such as “Dorothy: The Haunting of Oz” scheduled for release next August.
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Starring: Cynthia Erivo, Ariana Grande, Jonathan Bailey, Michelle Yeoh, Jeff Goldblum
Directed by: Jon M. Chu
Other: A Universal Pictures theatrical release. Rated PG. 138 minutes.