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Why did the critics hate WICKED: For Good? | Review roundup for the movie musical adaptation
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Mickey Jo
Honestly, if there's one thing I love even more than Wicked, it's critical discourse. Hitting the Lucozade hard for this one because pink goes good with incapacitating rage. Oh my God. Hey, it's good to see me, isn't it? No need to respond. That was obnoxious. My name is Mickey Jo. I'm obsessed with all things theatre and I'm a professional theatre critic here on social media. And today we are going to be wading into some of the More negative reviews of Wicked for Good, the second in the two part film adaptation of the hit Broadway musical turned global phenomenon Wicked. Now this year I have already shared two of my own reviews of Wicked for Good, one with and one without spoilers, the second of which was an hour long. So if you want to know some, but not all of the thoughts that I had about the film, you can go and check that out if you haven't already. But just like I did last year, I plan to spend the few weeks following the highly anticipated and very exciting release of this film in cinemas talking about other conversations which arise as promised. There will be one such video from me talking about changes made to the show's second act to turn it into a film of which there are many, as well as another speculating about the possibility of spin offs and further sequels, and potentially one just focusing on the number of fun references and Easter eggs both to Wicked and of course to the wizard of Oz. And my plan had been to release these over a series of Wicked Wednesdays that somehow already gone awry. So instead we're going to have Wicked weekends this year. I know. How exciting for us all. Brilliant news for those of us whose biggest Saturday night plans involves sitting at home and thinking about Wicked. I see you, I've been you in many ways. I still am. And before we get into any of those upcoming videos today, I am going to do for this film what I have done for several West End and Broadway musicals, which is, after having reviewed it myself, to have a good old roundup of all of the other reviews out there. And I say all the ones which we are focusing on today are the more negative reviews of Wicked for Good. Because this is something that has been talked about since the film was released. There seems to be a disproportionate level of negative and harsh critique. And while I champion the importance and validity of the different perspectives that different critics within the field can bring to the same piece of art, I haven't yet read any of these and I have been wondering whether some of this criticism might be in bad faith. And that's what we're going to try and find out today. Do the negative reviews of Wicked for Good feel fair? Or more to the point, have they been written by a handful of film critics who just don't like musicals that much now? No Mickey Jennings theater conversation would be complete without the audience consensus. Please let me know all of your thoughts in the comments section down below. Feel free to weigh in on some of the reviews that we will be focusing on today. And if you enjoy this and would like to hear more from me, make sure you're subscribed here on YouTube. Turn on notifications so YouTube lets you know every time I share a new video, which is pretty much daily at this point. Or go follow me on podcast platforms. For now, let's talk about Wicked for Good and why some critics insist that they hated it. So we're going to start with Justin Chang's eye catching headline for the New Yorker, which is Wicked for Good is very, Very Bad. The best thing about the 2024 movie Wicked was that it ended after some two and a half hours of dubious wizard of Oz revisionism, which admittedly was not the work of the film. Stolidly anti fascist politics and digitally shellacked song and dance spectacle. That was hard to say. The director, John M. Chu, brought the curtain down on a high note, soaring on a broomstick over the Emerald City Elphabethrop, green of flesh, pointy of hat, unfailingly pure of heart, I' enjoying this, ascended to the peak of her magical powers and struck fear into her enemies. Where do we get to the part where it's bad? Her complicit frenemy Glinda, a woman with the pastel pink stylings and the moral courage of a frosted cupcake, Elphaba became the Wicked Witch of the West, a convenient scapegoat for a fear mongering authoritarian regime. What a world, what a world. The End the source material here is the long running stage musical Wicked, which itself was an artificially sweetened adaptation of Gregory Maguire's far darker 1995 novel. We got there eventually on Broadway. It took two and a half hours plus a 15 minute intermission for the show to disgorge its story, an elaborate through a witch's eye prequel to the classic L. Frank Baum novel. But in reshaping Wicked for the screen, Chu and the screenwriters decided that more would be more. Defying brevity. That's actually quite good. They cleaved the movie into two parts, Wicked Part 1 and the newly arrived Wicked for Good, effectively doubling the running time to five hours and stretching the intermission to the length of a year. Here is my thought about this immediately, because there was much criticism around that fact when it was first announced. People were saying, oh, they're just doing it to make more money. They're dragging it out for no reason. And there was a, I guess non unanimous agreement after the first film came out that a lot of the space and the expanse on the story did a lot to help Wicked and provide additional depth and gave it a lot more room to breathe. There's some more musings on this here. Such acts of cinematosis are hardly new in Hollywood with a two part Dune adaptation and a two part Mission Impossible adventure. Among the most recent examples are these choices driven by art, commerce or a sliding scale combination of the two. The Wicked split reeked of mercenary foolishness from the start, especially for those who recall how front loaded the show's meager pleasures were. Meager pleasures for one of the most successful and best selling musicals of all time. A show which has become an undisputed global phenomenon. I also think that there's little argument to be made here as a matter of principle in terms of how many movies something ought to be adapted into. It's determined, you know, by the material. Should every book that's been turned into a TV series simply be a single episode? Instead, should the Bible be made simply into one feature film? Because technically speaking, it's one book. Part one, whatever its missteps, delivered those pleasures capably enough. You can tell this is a critic who enjoyed that in spite of themselves and that is the best compliment they are willing to give. I'm sorry it gave us Erivo and Grande, as admittedly does Part two. As well matched as Pistachio and Cherry and sufficiently full throated to deliver fine new renditions of Defying Gravity and Popular, the show's two standout songs. I'm sorry, I will give you Defying Gravity. Just objectively speaking. In what universe? In what universe? And feel free to fight me in the comments section. I have Time Today is Popular. The other standout song of Wicked. I don't know. I mean, maybe, perhaps, I guess in terms of popularity, I don't think that it's the second best song in Wicked. I don't know, maybe it is. But I do think it's misrepresentative to suggest that it's not among a very solid score, to suggest that it's those two sort of head and shoulders above the likes of what Is this Feeling and For Good and no Good Deed and Dancing Through Life and the wizard and I and no One Mourns the Wicked. I think for the most part the entire score exists pretty much on one level. There are a couple of skip tracks in there. I'm not going to lie to you about the likes of I Am a Sentimental man and you know, what's the other one? I know there's another one. Oh, Something Bad. We all know where we stand when the goat starts singing, but I am not willing to accept this. We're also still just talking about the first one. Here we go in Wicked for Good, School days are very much a thing of the past. The wizard has gone full dictator, a turn that Goldblum underplays drolly with a sinister little can't we get along? Shrug, and the consequences prove especially harsh for lions and tigers and bears. This critic enjoys a Wizard of Oz pun not to be out fumed. Michelle Yeoh returns in a burst of hocus pocus, semaphore and bird attack coiffure as the Wizard's most ruthless ally. Helpfully, she goes by the name Madam Morrible. Was crazy witch Asian? Deemed too unsubtle? I can't tell if that's borderline offensive or a really good pun. Morrible tries to ensnare the loyalties of Elphaba's closest ex classmates. Glinda, a smiling yet conflicted mascot for the Oztocracy. That's actually they would have used that if you'd pitched it to them. And then finally, I think we're going to arrive at something more substantial in terms of criticism for my taste, too much of Wicked for good plays like Oz the World Turns, though I'd credit most daytime soap operas with superior production values. Why is everything in this movie, for all its lavishly gilded emeralds, studded set design, either too dim or too bright, so blindingly backlit that Oz seems to be under perpetual thermonuclear attack, or so murky that you could scarcely tell a monkey from a Munchkin. That is racist. That's actually. That's actually Munchkin racist. Worth pointing out, though, that the only actual criticism landed in that entire paragraph is the lighting is bad, which I don't disagree with. And though I'm glad that the film was made when it was because we had Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande, a part of me does long for the version of this film that might have been made 10 or 20 years ago, when I think it would have been color graded quite differently. But I'll talk about Nesseros here. Nesseros is used as a wheelchair, and one of the most wretched aspects of Wicked for Good is its conflation of physical disability and soul crushing bitterness. Oh, he would have hated the show then. Some thoughts here on the conjoining of this plot with that of Baume's novel and the 1939 film wizard of Oz. Must they be maneuvered so clumsily and with such A glaring absence of brain or heart. In time we will be introduced to Dorothy Gale. Cue a few flashes of gingham and force fed origin stories for her traveling companions, which range from the nonsensically contrived to the gratuitously traumatizing. Even if your children can stomach the Tin Man's arrival, the Scarecrow's cornfield crucifixion might be the last straw. You just wanted to say that so that you could say the last straw. That's not gory whatsoever. Of all the body horror that there could be, I think it's really not that traumatizing. On stage, all this narrative retconning has a breezy behind the scenes cleverness, as if the story were being slyly fleshed out in the margins. On screen and on full detail display, it's close to an abomination, a travesty of fairy tale logic and pop culture memory. It's as if the picture was so cowed by its iconic predecessor that it could only respond with a petulant urge to destroy the classic it could never be. That's a bizarre read on the relationship between Wicked and the wizard of Oz. And I don't know that there's inherently something so different about the way it plays on screen versus on stage that it warrants that level of criticism. Maguire's novel itself was written in the spirit of a corrective. It aimed to bring a morally ambiguous modernism and a grown up, forthright sexuality to bear on bound, squeaky clean demarcations of good and evil. On the carnal front, at least the musical is made of softer stuff. The less said the better about Elphaba and Fierro's drippy seduction number. Is this a criticism that it doesn't go far enough? That it's not as carnal as Maguire's novel? Because you just said that the scarecrow in the cornfield and the couple of grayscale flashes we get of that might be too much for children. What did you want Fiyero and Elphaba to do? Some legitimate passion does erupt when Elphaba and Glinda, reunited by tragedy, let their long, simmering rivalry bubble over in a wand versus broomstick smackdown. Down. Which witch emerges victorious not just from that cat fight, but from the whole of this busy, confused, hopelessly mangled movie. I'd say the film is fortunate to have them both. It's satisfying to see Elphaba in aggressive defiance of the wizard's regime. Grande too, has come into her own after her delicate comic hijinks in part one, she has the trickier task of expressing Glinda's first real experience of rejection and disillusionment. It's time for her bubble to pop, she sings of herself in a quavering ballad, one of two new songs. Here we Go. Neither memorable. I I sadly agree that Schwartz wrote for the film. This rare moment of self awareness arrives at perhaps the least opportune time. Glinda is in her luxurious tower room, watching from on high as the Emerald City descends into chaos. It's tone deaf, but honest. And you know, this doesn't read like a relentlessly unfair critique of the film, but it does read like this is someone who actually has something a little more positive to say about it, but who is shrinking that willfully at every opportunity. The Wicked movies never convince us in the way that the wizard of Oz or Walter Murch's darkly thrilling return to Oz in 1985 convinced us of the fantastic reality of Oz as an actual place. Chu and his screenwriters evince no curiosity about the history, culture and politics of the realm, or even about the potential stakes of the people's capitulation to the Wizard's fascism. And I don't necessarily disagree with that. I think inherently it's because Wicked was constructed first on the page, then on the stage, and now subsequently on screen as a companion piece to the wizard of Oz that is perhaps admittedly a little overly reliant on the existing world building. I don't think that enough work is done by John M. Chu and team to create, like is said here, a very believable world that we can all conceive of. And I mentioned briefly in my own review, things like Munchkinland being perhaps the only governance within the Land of Oz that actually exists. The citizens of Oz are treated as no more than an undifferentiated crowd of extras, which I would argue they are in the 1939 film as well, an ignorant and finally disposable monolith. The movie's flattery of the audience and of our supposedly superior conscience is an expression of the same contempt. I think the wizard of Oz benefits from an awful lot of nostalgic fondness and is a cinematic classic and deserves to be and is a product of its time as well. But for this critic it does seem to have this sort of untouchable, godlike status which I think has perhaps informed, maybe even colored the review here. I don't know that the feelings expressed really justify the headline, nor that it was particularly a good faith review of the film. Because it seems to express its own contempt for Wicked even existing in the first place as a concept. Next we have time. Wicked for Good is, sadly, not for the better. This By Stephanie Zacharek Film Critic those who loved last year's Wicked 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. They really don't like those colors. More of the same dishwater hues songs. Okay, we're gonna have a fight at some point if you keep criticizing. Go and listen to a lot of cont. If you think the Wicked score is bad, then boy do I have a Broadway musical for you over the next couple of months that you can go listen to 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 all together. In fact, you know what this is. This, I do feel sometimes is a critic rallying against something that hasn't established popularity and Wicked success as a film adaptation. This time last year, when the first one was just coming out, hadn't yet been fully confirmed. It was already a huge brand for the stage version. But now that it's a victory lap of sorts after the first film did really well and people are already very excited to see the sequel, there is this sense of of the film critics digging the knives in just a little bit harder because they know that they're not convincing anyone to see it or skip it either way, so they just want to have their say. There was a similar sensation when the Hunger Games made its way to the stage recently and in spite of sort of mixed to negative criticism, was selling very well and will continue to sell very well for some time simply on its name or when Back to the Future, the musical arrived on Broadway. Where was I? Those with the freedom to parcel it all together, which is, you know, anyone who wants to no one's being. No one is being marched into this theater by Ozzy and guards 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. Cynthia Eriva 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. Right being the operative word. Some discussion of the plot, more discussion of the plot. Elphaba can't catch a break. The movie chugs along dutifully as she tries to redeem her herself by always doing the right thing with her powerful magic, even as Glinda grabs all the credit and all the glamour. And you know what they say, blondes have more political success. So why is Wicked for good such a dud? Here we go. 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 itself inspired by the magnificent fanciful books written by L. Frank Baum around the turn of the century. Yada, yada, yada, yada, yada. 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. It's essentially a fairly substantial exploration of the whole like, walk a mile in someone else's shoes idea. Just, you know, don't steal those shoes from their dead sister. 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. I think that's a horrible idea. I think, you know, someone is welcome to try and do this. Take the footage once this arrives on digital streaming and combine these two and try and edit it down into one two and a half hour film. Try and resolve the problem of what happens in the immediate aftermath of Defying Gravity, this weirdly climactic moment in the middle of an uninterrupted film, and tell me that that works. Tell me you can get that first film in particular into like. Even if you were to edit that into like 1 hour 45 and then try and wrap up the whole thing In a further 45 minutes, you will find it's incredibly challenging. And don't try and cut songs, because I personally will be at your door asking for reasons why other than the two songs from the new film. Those. Those we can jettison. 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. Let's quantify that. Why do we say this, and certainly not in a floating soap bubble? The music in Wicked for Good is so tuneless and meandering, it made me, for the songs featured in the earlier movie, at least Three of which get reprised in this film. So I don't think that's a hugely valid criticism. There is such a consistency between the melodies and the motifs of the first act of Wicked into the second. You hear what is this feeling? Again, you hear the a little bit of popular. Again, you hear the wizard and I. Again, you hear the entirety of I'm not that Girl reprised by a different character. We get yet another unlimited la da da da. Oh, I stopped reading that sentence too soon. The rest of it is way, way worse verse. It made me yearn for the songs featured in the earlier movie, which seemed dreadful enough at the time, but were at least moderately humble. Do these people just hate musical theatre? Is that where we're at? Do you just. If you hate the songs from Wicked, if you hate the score of Wicked in particular, I can deal with even theatre fans criticizing Wicked as a stage musical and launching valid enough critiques at it. But the score, the Stephen Schwartz score of Wicked, we think, is. Is moderately hummable. I want to bring these people to Marie's Crisis or sit them down at a large table at Gayle's Broadway Rose so they can listen to an entire restaurant in unison, passionately sing along to any number of songs from Wicked. You play something bad and the people at Marie's Crisis will still sing along to that. That is how well we know these songs, and that is how not just hummable, but singable the damn score is. Oh, these people are upsetting me. Objectively, Erivo and Grande are perfectly calm, lovely to hear. Both can sing, perhaps much better than they need to, given the sluggish quality of the songs. Ah, it's like you want me to cry. But this material serves no one. The ostensibly deep messages and themes come at you like baseballs gone wild in a batting cage. And between the word ostensibly in that sentence and rogue sports metaphor, this sounds like something I could have said. Respect animals. Exclamation point. Be wary of doing good deeds just for attention. The pretty blonde white girl may actually 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, and I'm not sure that that's a particularly reasonable thing either, because you have a choice here. You can either criticize it for having obvious messages, which I believe they already did earlier in this review, or you can call them ambiguous. But when a lot of your audience is young watchers, young teens, children, even then it's not necessarily the worst thing. In the world to have slightly derivative political messages. Like I said, we don't dig in too deep to these socio political ideas, but they're still still important lessons to take from the thing. 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. What was this? One of them is wearing a fuzzy gray peignoir that appears to be crochet. You mean Elphaba and Fierro? They're the two denizens of Oz. What a weird way to phrase that. Yeah, we're talking about the sex cardigan, 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. It will surely be a hit, said with some resem sentiment and its defenders cries will be heard throughout the land. Well, you got me there. You got me. It's possible they saw this video coming, but it's filled with great lessons for children. I just said that. Oh no. I feel so seed. I loved the stage show as a little girl and now my little girl loves the movies, which obviously is a horrible thing to experience. It made me cry. Movie experiences are individual and often inexplicable. We love the things we love for reasons we can't always explain. I can go watch it, 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? Okay, well, I don't take issue with every single word you said there, Stephanie, but it's quite clear that we can't be friends. Who's next?
- [23:06]
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- [25:03]
Mickey Jo
Washington Post 2 stars defying gravity no more Wicked for Good is a letdown the second installment of the behemoth adaptation is bogged down with plot and bereft of bangers. Do these people not hear the song that is no good. What are you doing with your life? That's like top three wicked songs for me, actually. Thank Goodness to my mind, might rate even higher and offers a lot more emotional complexity than just about any of the songs in the first film. If, as film critics what you're looking for is meaning and depth, then I'm surprised that you didn't find that in a song like thank Goodness. Although I will say I'm not sure that the most rewarding passage of that song is actually depicted all that well on screen in this sort of high half freeze frame half not moment when there's confetti hanging in the air but people are still moving around when she's giving you bridges you crossed. You didn't know you crossed until you crossed. And admittedly that may be a lyric that people did not care for, right? Naveen Kumar oh, I've read your writing before. You've reviewed theatre, surely? Let's talk about this two star review and it's two stars out of four. So that's only like two and a half. So in theatrical terms, in a five star rating system that would be a two or a three, which. Which is not terrible. I think I would probably personally have settled on a four star review for Wicked for Good out of a five star system. The kooky fraud played by Jeff Goldblum in Wicked For Good has a ditty explaining how he maintains his wizardly dominance. Wizardly good word. Once people believe in something, he shrugs, they'll keep on believing no matter what. Given its Already record breaking box office. I see where we're going here. The same appears likely to hold true for the less marvellous second half of director John M. Chu's behemoth adaptation of the Broadway music musical, even after a year long intermission which people are taking such issue with so impatient, anyone whose jaw hung open during the final moments of Wicked Part one would have to be insane or dead not to return. Unfortunately, the laws of physics are back in effect and the second film is a letdown. How could it not be? The kids are grown up and the fun and games are over. There are only a couple of bangers left in Stephen Schwartz's original score by the musical Second act, which races to connect the narrative dots to the wizard of the Oz with some additional material by screenwriters Dana Fox and Winnie Holtzman, and a relatively fleet runtime of 2 hours and 18 minutes, which is 20 ish minutes less than the first. Somehow Wicked For Good feels like it's both scrambling between plot points and vamping to justify its existence, which is perhaps a hangover from the second act of the stage musical that you could say similar things about. First, an obvious warning. This is not a standalone movie, and I concur. Don't go in thinking you'll all understand what's going on if you haven't seen the 2024 film, which would be a baffling choice for what it's worth. And perh, perhaps more important, the wizard of Oz from 1939. Do you see? Do you need to have seen the wizard of Oz? This is my thing. Because there may be a lot of kids going to see this who haven't seen the wizard of Oz, don't necessarily know the plot of the wizard of Oz, who care more about the characters of Wicked. Is it necessary that you understand the significance when you're seeing him as a Tin Man? When you see that transformation, you're like, oh, we know who that is, we know where this is going. Do you need to know that? I guess when they arrive and there's only the slightest flash of the them before the wizard and you just hear bring me the broomstick, that would seem incredibly rushed and under explained. Like how did they all end up together? I guess that would need a little bit more justification and arguably still does. So in conclusion, yes, yes, you probably should. And also, why not? Why not show your kids the wizard of Oz? It's a cinema classic as much as For Good is bogged down with a bonanza of incidents, there's also a lot happening outside the frame that it assumes you're easily following. As we just mused on, the major consequence of cleaving Wicked in two is that the second part is like a pair of Munchkin legs scrambling towards the finish line, with only the phantom presence of the Heartbeat in its other and much better half. I can't tell whether that's a BOK losing his heart reference or a slightly ableist Munchkin commentary. I don't want to dig further into that sentence. We're gonna move on. The first movie was essentially an effervescent high school comedy that culminated in an Emerald City road trip. It deepened the bond between the Green and Good witches in a way that surpassed what's possible on stage now. Our engagement with the whole gang is meant to carry over from their school days, but the tremendous momentum and feeling generated by part one is tough to regain with a few gossamer flashbacks. Time has passed, on screen and off, and picking up in the middle of each character's arc is disorienting. Sure, a double screening might help, which I think would be a very fun thing to do, but I haven't yet explained experienced. But unlike the witchy synergy between besties, our time on Earth is not unlimited. Oh, you can't go and see another film before you go see this film. What are you doing in your day? What is any of us doing in our day? You also just told everyone in the last paragraph that they needed to have not only seen that, but also a third different film before going to see this one. So it's not like the idea of doing a back to back screening is completely inconceivable. If the worst thing you can say about a film is that it's important important for you to watch another film immediately before it, then I personally don't think that that's the end of the world. What else do we have here? Cast off in maligned a Revo's Alphabet is hiding out in an elaborate treehouse lair, plotting to expose the wizard under his cruel crusade. The animal citizens of Oz have either been subjugated, some in service of building his signature gilded vanity project, or forced to flee. The movie smartly doesn't force parallels to the present day. They are obvious and baked into the source material. The ways of tyranny are timeless, apparently, which I said early in my review was probably one of its greatest strengths. Meanwhile, Ariana Grande's Glinda has been exalted as the face of Good. The former friends are now opposing brands with Michelle Yeoh's Madame Morrible as the PR grandmaster. The Oscar winner could have taken a cue from fellow baddie Goldblum and both of their wigs, which grow wackier throughout and had a lot more fun. I agree she's a subdued stiff where a flamboyant villain ought to be and indeed, where one is is in the stage show. I believe Naveen Kumar has in fact seen the stage production of Wicked. I would question how many of the rest of these critics have despite its packed agenda, the film can also feel meandering and directionless. The most repeated bit of cutesy slang, a comedic device from the first movie only occasionally continued here, is asking for a clock tick to register what's going on, and nearly every character has a gazing in the mirror to self reflect moment, a signal that much of the conflict is internal, which is a fair enough observation. The two added songs by Schwartz, Elphaba's no Place Like Home, which earns mewing approval from the as she's entreating not to leave Oz, and the Girl in the Bubble, in which Glinda wonders whether it's time for her bubble to pop, are pleasant at best. Despite their cliches, they feel like necessary filler, written in the style of Wicked, perhaps, but without the verve. And they're far from the sort of Oscar bait packed into the first part. And the songs in the first part are not Oscar bait. And I take back every comment that I just made about this person knowing the stage show well, because none of the songs in the first part part were Oscar eligible, and we've already been through the Academy Awards season to find that out. So what a strange thing to say, though fewer and far between, there are a handful of cinematic flourishes executed in high style, including Elphaba's thundering lament, no Good Deed, and Glinda's gorgeous walk down the aisle crazy rich Asian style, interrupted by a wild stampede, hoofs and feathers flying. Forget Carrie Bradshaw. A new dashed bride to be has been crowned supreme. And one of the things I neglected to see, say, in my full spoiler review was I think that was actually the best shot of the film when it cut between not only that moment, but Elphaba simultaneously walking down a set of stairs, flanked on either side not by adoring family and friends and the wealthiest and most influential citizens of Oz, but by animals in cages as they cut between the fates of the two former friends. I thought that was very powerful and was something only the film could achieve achieve for anyone already invested in the story, which is a fair enough thing to point out, there will be moments of wonder and or tears, at least somewhere along the way. But as Ozian lore for good is a companion text, a torn out chapter, that's necessary reading to reach the end. For those who've learned from Dorothy that it's really about the journey, at least there are other routes to the Yellow Brick Road, and for the most part I do think I agreed with almost all of that. I don't know if it corresponds necessarily to a two star rating. I think you have to consider the audience, a huge proportion of whom will be existing fans of the film. But to what extent do you allow that to inform your objective critique of it? It's an interesting question. Who is wicked really for and how should that inform the way in which it's reviewed by these major film critics?
- [33:26]
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- [35:03]
Mickey Jo
We have time for perhaps a couple more and here's one I already know that I disagree with because of the headline. This is from the Telegraph, which grants the film a one star review and this time it's not one out of four. That last was a two out of four. I'll remind you, this is a one out of five, which I do think think is heinous. I think that's utterly unfair. And the headline that Robbie Collin, chief film critic, has given it is Ariana Grande is painfully wooden in Wicked's irritating sequel. A second installment of the Oz origin movie is bloated and boring, despite new songs for both Elphaba and Glinda. As if those are meant to make a difference. Okay, let's upset ourselves with this one. Even the staunchest defenders of Wicked. Hello, nice to meet you. The stage musical about the tragic origins of the wizard of the Oz's which of the west would have to concede that it peaks just before the interval? And I disagree. I don't think I have to concede that whatsoever. I also don't think that that's necessarily a bad thing. I think a highlight moment can come anyway. I think there's a lot of celebrated films whose highlight moments take place sort of within the first half or roughly in the middle of the thing. That's also how a lot of stage musicals are built. So it's sort of, sort of inherent that you would have this triumphant moment. The Lion King on stage peaks in the first five minutes. That's a problem. So Universal's decision to split their screen adaptation in two always meant that even in a best case scenario, Part two was going to be a bit stingy and thin. That's not entirely unfair or incorrect. While the end result isn't quite the worst case scenario some of us were dreading. Have you been lying awake at night? Have you been concerned? It's still a deeply annoying one. Let's find out why. Why we are back in the franchise's strikingly unpersuasive version of Oz, for reasons we've already heard elsewhere, with its computer generated sunlight and Haribo color schemes where Cynthia Erivo's Elphaba Throp has just gone rogue. The green skinned magical trainee from Shiz University, AKA Woke Hogwarts. Okay, we're gonna have a real issue here because also, and not that I really want to talk about it all that much for reasons I've made very apparent apparent in previous conversations around that particular franchise. But for what it's worth, if you were paying any kind of attention to those not two, but eight films, the last two of which were in fact one thing split into two. I know. Shock horror. Then you would have realized that Hogwarts is and has always been Woke Hogwarts. Good grief. She's now carrying out a one witch campaign of guerrilla warfare against the Oz regime while hooking up with Jonathan Bailey's Prince Fierro, who is betrothed to Ariana Grande's Glyndon the Good at her treehouse in the evenings. Okay. What? That's a misrepresentation of the sequence of events of this film. Did this critic fall asleep? Listen, it happens. There's plenty of double crossing to get through before Dorothy's arrival, whose appearance here turns out to be part of an Oz psychological operation to draw Elphaba out of hiding. But it doesn't amount to two hours of story. The stage show clips through the same plot in around half the time, and the padding is as obvious as it is exhausted, exhausting. Here comes the Ariana Grande section. Grande, in particular, often seems to be trying to walk through her scenes as slowly as possible. As a performer, she has a range of four octaves and around 1.6 emotions, and as such, Glinda's smaller moments simply aren't dramatically interesting enough to merit this moodily protracted approach. And I wildly disagree. I thought she was fantastic in the film. She is sobbing with devastation. She is playing a lot of this. This conflict. I think she's a much more interesting character than Fiyero, who simply cares for Elphaba and is like, no, this is wrong. And I have to go to her. And I am drawn to her because we shared that one lion rescue together. I think she's way more interesting. You want to see someone with fewer than 1.6 emotions in this film. That's Michelle's Madame Morrible. Sadly, Jeff Goldblum similarly can't seem to articulate anything with any kind of emotion. I even think that Cynthia Eriva. Erivo has a smaller emotional range, and I really wanted to see her raw devastation and grief heading through no Good Deed as Elphaba. I think Ariana Grande probably has the greatest emotional spectrum of this film, so that is wild to me to read. Erivo is a little better, according to this critic. You certainly buy her in a torment. But the pair's strained friendship rings false, and what should be piercing, impassioned moments are by turns frivolous and sappy. Both stars have been given a new song, both by original composer Stephen Harris Schwartz, which stand out by dint of being fully formed musical numbers, as opposed to the noodly warblings that make up most of the rest of the score. Inexplicably, though, both are wailing laments, and you find yourself grasping for a new comic number like Popular or another barnstormer like Defying Gravity. You had one. It was called no Good Deed. Why had nobody listen to no Good Deed? Also, you wanted a new comic number in the midst of where were you going to put that? Was it going to happen after Glinda got left at the altar? Or was it going to happen in the moment when Elphaba realized that everything positive she has ever tried to do for anyone she cared about in her life has resulted in their misery, imprisonment and or death? What an opportune moment for popular reprise we conclude by saying what makes it so frustrating is that director John M. Chu is an established musicals master. His in the Heights is a modern classic of the form and I agree, shockingly. But the corporate stretch it out and ring it dry approach here has been deadening and it almost feels as though people really took issue with the notion of this before even seeing seeing the films called a whole benighted enterprise Wicked for Ill. Really? That's the line we want to end on Wicked for Ill. Okay, we can't. That can't be the final one I read. I need someone to really bring me something convincing of substance here because there's so much of the film that they seem to either not be engaging with or seem to be simply disregarding. And it can't just be my nostalgia, right? It can't just be the fact that I've seen this many times on stage that it's a show that I enjoy. It's not one of my favorite music musicals of all time. It's not one of the shows that I have seen the most. It's something that I know well. There's something very novel and exciting about seeing it on screen, but I think that it has merit. Separately to all of that, I really do. Let's finish with Clarice Luffrey in the Independent. A two star review out of five. Not quite as cynical. Perhaps here there's no magic in this aimless slog of a sequel. She nonetheless remains rights Cynthia Erivo scores, but Ariana Grande less so, and director John M. Chu still hasn't figured out how to properly light any of this, which, you know, all over social media is the biggest criticism that I am seeing of both of these films and has been since we saw the very first teaser trailer. People were concerned and those concerns have only really been confirmed. And that is the note on which we begin this review. If your complaint about last year's Wicked was that it was so oddly lit that you could barely see what was going on then, film fear not. In Wicked for Good, you won't mind so much because there's so little to look at. Oof. Here you'll find no gallivanting between the whimsical towers of Shiz University. No rambunctious dance breaks, which is true to an extent. There's a little moment of dance, there's a couple of times that they find to do a little bit of choreography. I guess once again, it's a holdover from the Act 1, Act 2 stage musical approach. Because if you're going to get a big number with an extended dance break, I guess finding that only in the first act and not in the second is not that unusual. No Ariana Grande swinging from a chandelier, which wasn't that impactful a moment in the first film as far as I was concerned. Clearly Clarice loved it. The back half of Stephen Schwartz and Winnie Holtzman's musical Adapted from the 1995 novel we know, We Know, We Know that questions the wickedness of the Wicked Witch of the west was always a bit of a slog, which implies that they've actually seen the stage show. And John M. Chu's direction, even with all that budget and talent at hand, fails to find a satisfactory fix. That's not necessarily unfair. Elphaba has already declared herself a rebel with a cause via the last film's climactic Defying Gravity Part 2, then must deal with the drier, more bureaucratic business of getting us from that revelation to her predestined meeting with a bucket of water thrown by a homesick Kansas native. That's actually a great sentence. And so we're reintroduced to her out in Oz, rallying the marginalized animals of the land to stay and fight for what's rightly theirs. All while her former frenemy turned bestie Glinda stays behind with the wizard and his right hand woman, Madame Morrible, the guilt of her own inaction brewing like a fish in a percolator. She knows deep down she's upholding a corrupt system. But the perks, one of them being 2025's sexiest man alive, Jonathan Bailey as her fiance Fierro. Hilarious way to write that are hard to resist, but these are essentially foregone conclusions by the end of the first film for good. Has little sense of movement, literally or emotionally. No profound revelations, no wonder or spectacle. Some of that is true. I disagree about the wonder and spectacle, but it's fair enough in terms of revelation. Revelation. All that's to be done now is for each character to process via standardized ballad what they've learned as they wander aimlessly around dimly lit woods or millennial pink bedrooms in the same cycle of mid shots and close ups. Schwartz's new song for no Place Like Home is certainly effective in the blunt force of its sincerity. Erivo handles its emotions beautifully and, as always, hits every note with ease. At least they're not saying that they're bad singers that I really wouldn't be able to stomach embracing wholeheartedly what it means for a queer black woman to sing the words, how do I love this place that's never loved me? I mean, that's a great inference. I love that we're talking about that. Grande, however, feels less served by the girl in the Bubble. And while she's a perfect Glinda in her comedic moments, that's a little less true of her character when she's hit rock bottom. Which, once again, I entirely disagree with. Wicked's ability to hold up as an effective allegory for the fight for change from within and outside of the system continually falters when it's hit with the excessive need to explain how things came to be. The Scarecrow, the Tin man, the Cowardly Lion, Glinda's bubble, the Yellow Brick Road, Dorothy's shoes. Wicked insists that every element of the wizard of Oz has to be explained and demystified. And I don't read that as an insistence thereof. I think it's more a playful explanation of all of those things that we've always just taken for granted as existing for no explicit reason. That's the whole point of Wicked. All of these things that you simply knew to be true. All of those things, things that you perhaps met in adolescence. When you grow older, you learn about how they came to be. You find out more about how leaders were elected. You find out more about, you know, the colonial system that brought your country to the place that it's in now. These are just a couple of ideas about how you find out when you grow older, more about the life that you've already been living this entire time. And that, I think, has always been a little bit of what Wicked it is to the wizard of Oz, or what it tries to be. At least there's no room for magic there. Nor in Chu's direction, which takes all of the boiling bitterness of Elphaba's no good deed, her rage against her own fate, and sets it against a flat background of anonymous sludge, hued castle walls and murky skies. And I have expressed a little bit of my own disappointment with no Good Deed. I maintain that it's a really fantastic song. Something about that sequence. I think it's impressive. It's cool. To look at it was a fun way to do it. I don't know that it's my dream for how no good deed could have been realized on screen. I think I would love a version that's a little bit more still and intimate with Elphaba perhaps contained within a more claustrophobic space rather than leaping and jumping around. Maybe that area that we see her singing no Good Deed in ought to be where she arrives by the end of the thing, like she's walking up a staircase while doing. Maybe that's the reason why no Good Deed. And then finally she gets to that dramatic area. But I want it to start somewhere a little bit different. I guess we should at least be thankful we've been spared the monstrosity of a CGI rendered Judy Garland as Dorothy. This is a habit of negative reviews that I don't enjoy, which is they will point out something that didn't happen and hold up how terrible that would have been as an example of the film's bad choices which didn't happen. That said, there are some extremely disconcerting use of de aging tech elsewhere for about five frames. But as those witches might say, one good deed hardly changes things for the bright better. I that's not something the witches actually do say. But I agree with you, they might. And at this point there are a handful more. This has been a fairly popular conclusion for the film critics to arrive at. We could keep reading, but they are all saying more or less the same thing. They have criticisms in terms of the narrative, they have criticisms in terms of the pacing. And I don't know that all of that is necessarily unfair. And I think a certain amount of it. We just can't came to expect. Those of us who knew the show, who loved the show going into the cinema. We knew what Act 2 was, we knew where our expectations were. And in fact a lot of improvements were made on Act 2. If you were to just take that and put it directly onto the screen, you would have had bigger problems. They did fairly good work in terms of patching some of the holes. There are others that they didn't necessarily even address. Which again is something that I said in my own review and let it be known. I am not entirely positive on the film either. I am not suggesting that this is a masterpiece. I don't. I don't think it is a top tier stage to screen adaptation. I think the first wicked film deserves to be in that echelon a little bit more. But I also think it's one of the more unruly musicals to adapt for the screen. And ultimately, though almost all of these critics disagreed with this notion, I do think that a two part adaptation was the right way to do it. And I think we felt a lot of the benefit of that, even if just in the first act when we really had that room for, for depth and breathing. I think it's this complicated thing where maybe the first act of Wicked deserved to be its own entire standalone film. And the second act was then met with an awful lot of challenges because that needed new songs to be written in order to flesh it out a little bit more in the face of the challenging reality of them not being able to show that much stuff from the wizard of Oz because of MGM and copyright and the yellow brick walls of intellectual property. Boundaries. Boundaries. All of that being said, I do think that the majority of these reviews have skewed disproportionately harsh. And there's also something to be said, you know, filmmaking is a business, so is this particular brand of journalism. And in the face of the guaranteed box office success that Wicked for good was always going to have, it wouldn't shock me if dialing up their opinions to be that little bit more negative, that little bit more controversial. Maybe a two star goes down to a one star with a little, little bit of pressure from the editor. None of that would surprise me whatsoever. In the name of getting a few more clicks amidst the release of a major film. And if it does continue to do very well and continue to resonate with the fans and perhaps even perform a little well throughout awards season, I'm not expecting Best Original Song. But maybe there will be a couple of nominations, maybe even a couple of creative wins. Then ultimately even a slew of negative reviews. Reviews haven't really hurt the film or its legacy all that much. All they have done is hurt me in having to read them today. But I already knew what I thought of the film. None of them have changed my opinion, certainly not for good. And if you would like to share your thoughts on any of those reviews, I would love to hear them in the comments section down below. In the meantime, stay tuned for next weekend when I will be back with more Wicked content. The next thing that we're going to talk about is those changes made from the second act in Bright bringing it to the screen. What did they change? What did they keep the same? Why were those decisions made? We will talk about it next week. Make sure you're subscribed with the notifications turned on so you don't miss that video and thank you so much for listening to this one. As always, I hope that everyone is staying safe and that you have a stagey day. For 10 more seconds, I'm Mickey Jo Theatre. Oh my God. Hey, thanks for watching. Have a stagey day. Subscribe.
- [50:20]
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- [51:10]
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