Wicked: For Good Is Bad

Wicked: For Good Is A Huge Downgrade Of A Film

Not to use the most obvious joke ever twice, but Wicked: For Good is bad. Many of the things that made the first movie (possibly) my favorite film musical is still in this sequel, but there’s something deeply crucial missing. Even with jaw-droppingly gorgeous sets, lush costumes, amazing singers at every turn, and state-of-the-art CGI, everything—and I mean everything—suffers from a few core problems.

The most obvious one is the music. There’s barely any music in Wicked: For Good. The songs all feel shorter, rushed, and leaning toward uninteresting ballads. I can only think of two musical numbers that break through the slog. One is when Elphaba decides that she’s going to be the villain of the story and the other is the wonderful duet between the two leads. That leaves more than two hours of runtime stagnant and awkwardly paced. That leaves the story to do much of the heavy lifting, and wow, is it not prepared for that.

The Fun And Bombast Is Drastically Reduced Here

Don’t get me wrong, Wicked: For Good has the same appeal as the whole of Wicked’s endeavor: it plays with the source material in interesting ways. I’m especially fond of how the themes of propaganda and blame inform both Wicked films, highlighting various ways a government can exert control through fear. But not every explanation is a slam dunk. Not every reason makes sense. I haven’t seen the stage play—or read the books—but I couldn’t help but feel like the story was forcing certain moments just because they had to happen. I think it’s entirely reasonable for audiences to go into a Wizard of Oz prequel and have one of their primary questions be how we get the Tin Man or a burning curiosity about the mechanics of people ending up in Oz from other worlds, but the answers given in Wicked: For Good are sparse, strange, and feel like massive breaks from the tone/rules of this world. That dang magic book can “shrink” hearts, create an android body and transfer a conscience into it, convert flesh to hay, and create the slippers (which appear to give some sort of levitation magic in them?) all with a few words spoken correctly. I don’t care if the book is a god in disguise. It’s random and chaotic storytelling and somehow doesn’t even feel like fairytale logic.

The Answers Keep Being Convenient Magic Spells

It also doesn’t help that the way scenes go in Wicked: For Good start to have the rhythm of utilizing a checklist. I didn’t want a third movie, but—without too many spoilers—scenes are increasingly short, to the point, and then go to the next with morbid pragmatism. Emotional whiplash becomes too kind a way to describe the viewing experience. The flying monkeys becoming Elphaba’s soldiers at the same time she (apparently) abandons her deep-seated worldview that informed every previous scene involving her. There’s a prolonged comedic wand fight in the presence of Nessa’s smashed corpse, that then transitions into a scene of corporal punishment. Dorothy gets thrown into the cellar mercilessly by Elphaba right before there’s a (honestly beautiful and emotionally potent) song about how Glinda and Elphaba’s friendship made them into more complex people. For that last one, I couldn’t help but find myself chuckling (and distracted) by the implication that Dorothy is right below them, listening in the dark to the song without context. That’s how off-putting the movie is.    

Even Strong Scenes Have Weird Stuff About Them

Oh, but there’s more. Wicked: For Good even undermined some of the compliments I gave the first Wicked. Back in that review, I said that most of the social commentary was handled better than most movies I’ve ever seen and that (though there’s always the possibility I missed something) it didn’t make any problematic moves. Well, in Wicked: For Good,the only disabled character in the whole movie turns into one of the three antagonists. She helps enable anti-munchkin laws in a frankly horrifying scene that calls to mind Nazi Germany, then tries to use magic to violate someone’s consent (after he rejects her), and then dies horribly only to motivate the main (off-screen) plot of Wizard of Oz. The animal plotline—arguably the most prominent plotline in Wicked besides Glinda and Elphaba’s relationship—is reduced to only a few scenes, with basically every animal character either disappearing from the narrative (via unexplained dimensional hole) or becoming unspeaking background characters where you would expect animals in any other narrative—but, in this universe, they are almost assuredly slaves presumably not speaking words out of fear of torture. It’s a bad movie.

It’s a bad way to connect the dots between Wicked 1and The Wizard of Oz. It’s a bad sequel. It’s a bad musical. Honestly, there are not enough songs for me to think of it as a musical. The only reason to see Wicked: For Good is because you watched the first one and didn’t want to leave the story unfinished.

  

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