In my review from a year ago, I predicted that waiting for the second half will drain any potential heft from the established drama. Watching Wicked: For Good, I felt the monkey paw twitch. I was right, but that meant I had to sit through another two hours of a bloated adaptation that has no business being this length.
Joonatan Itkonen
The story picks up an indeterminate amount of time later. Oz has settled into fairy tale fascism where once-intelligent and friendly animals are now forced into slavery and propaganda about the Wicked Witch of the West is part of the daily routine. Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) continues her fight against Oz (Jeff Goldblum), while Glinda (Ariana Grande) spends her days happily oblivious. Meanwhile, Oz's PR minster, Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh), continues her campaign to smear Elphaba's memory.
Right off the bat, the change in pacing makes Wicked: For Good feel off. The film says it's been "twelve turns of the tide" since we last saw everyone. Wikipedia claims that to be five years, others say it's ten or more. It shouldn't matter, but it raises all kinds of questions. What was Elphaba doing all this time? How come Glinda behaves like everything happened just yesterday? There is no sense of scale or relativity to the past; everything that isn't necessary for certain musical numbers to happen has frozen in time.
This leads to a narrative that is both overstuffed and busy while also too long for its own good. Major sequences drag on endlessly, while climactic ones feel truncated and breathless. Elphaba's major declaration to become what everyone thinks she is feels downright pointless because it comes and goes so quickly it barely registers.
It doesn't help that director John M. Chu still handles the musical numbers with all the energy and flair of a Sunday sermon. There are barely any big wide shots in this thing, despite the vast amounts of money thrown into it. Even a wand fight looks worse than the worst Marvel streaming show.
If the material was emotionally captivating it would probably be much harder to notice such things, and Wicked: For Good certainly tries its best. Every scene pushes for melodrama harder than the previous one, yet they're so disconnected from the setup a year prior they feel empty. At times, Chu even registers this, and delivers a flashback within the flashback structure of the narrative.
When the film attempts to bring back the core themes of fighting fascism, the duality of good and evil, or personal liberation against oppressive norms, it falls flat on its face. By splitting the already thin narrative in two, Wicked has to spend all its spare time reminding audiences about the where and why when it should drive in a greater message.
So when Elphaba sings about the importance of fighting for their land, it means very little because there's no indication of how long we've been in this fight. The Cowardly Lion makes an appearance and it takes an entire bit of dialog to remind us that Elphaba once rescued him as a cub. So perhaps it has been years, perhaps lions just grow faster here. Maybe it doesn't matter, because the Lion and the Scarecrow and the Tin Man barely feature past brand recognition.
Erivo and Grande are still great. They do what they can with even thinner material than before. They don't get any bangers this time around. Nothing on the scale of Defying Gravity, that's for sure. Both Goldblum and Yeoh get song and dance numbers, which are blissfully short. They're immensely charming actors, but singing and dancing is clearly not their strength.
If you loved the first Wicked, chances are you'll love For Good, too. Those that admire the stage play will notice the same weaknesses from the second act translate directly to screen. Fans of the book won't find any new enjoyment here. It is even more watered down than before.
And for us who barely found enjoyment in the first half, Wicked: For Good is a lifeless chore that feels like an extended second act of a film without structure. By the end, it exhausted me so thoroughly I was done. For good.
