YouTubers, TikTokers, and Letterboxd users made a major fuss over the desaturated color-grading of Jon M. Chu’s musical Wicked: Part One, turning its visual palette into a minor Internet controversy. The film’s muted greens and pinks were meant to differentiate Chu’s Oz from the classic Technicolor fantasia of The Wizard of Oz, with the director explaining that the film’s aesthetic was designed to “immerse people into Oz, to make it a real place.” But for reasons unknown, Chu’s bid for authenticity didn’t extend to the over-the-top CGI depictions of the Emerald City and Munchkinland. Chu seemingly opts for course-correction with Wicked: For Good: it’s altogether brighter than its predecessor in terms of lighting, saturation, and fabricated locations. The problem, then, is that while this is in service of establishing a contrast with a story and stakes that are meant to be darker, the film never achieves this goal.
For Good picks up more or less where the first film left off. Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) is alienated from her peers and on a mission to stop the Wizard (Jeff Goldblum) from domesticating the talking animals of Oz and building the Yellow Brick Road. Prince Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey) is working for the Wizard, but has mixed feelings because he’s really in love with Elphaba. Nessa (Marissa Bode), AKA the Wicked Witch of the East, is now the mayor of Munchkinland and wreaking havoc on her unrequited love interest Boq (Ethan Slater), while Glinda the Good (Ariana Grande) works as a propaganda machine for Madam Morrible (Michelle Yeoh).
Elphaba and Glinda have remained friends despite their coming-of-age and diverging life choices. Erivo continues to play Elphaba straight, a great irony for the queer actress, anchoring the character with a firm, almost severe conviction. She demonstrates moments of vulnerability during scenes with Grande and Bailey, but it’s not enough to deepen the performance in any meaningful. Elphaba is no longer the lost insecure, searching girl she was at Shiz University, but the film sidelines her struggles in favor of advancing the plot, and boy is there a lot of it crammed into the film’s 138-minute runtime. Grande’s slapstick riffs continue to add some much needed levity and balance out Erivo’s performance, and her high-pitched voice functions as an aural complement to Erivo’s weightiness, though neither actress comes off as especially rejuvenated here. The spark that energized the first film to a degree, and its juggernaut press tour, has simply worn off. Both actresses are still playing tired, well-worn tropes — the outcast and the popular girl — in For Good despite the shifting stakes and deeper gravity, and they’re left to move through the motions where their fragile bodies are hardly a picture of strength, let alone the seismic forces the film insists they represent.
In Wicked, bangers like “What is this Feeling,” “Popular” and “Defying Gravity” had true space to resonate and elevate, but in this second installment, every song feels decidedly rushed. Fan favorites from the original stage musical “No Good Deed” and “For Good” aren’t given the necessary breathing room, largely because they are sandwiched between two new, underwhelming songs: “No Place Like Home” and “The Girl in the Bubble.” Even their very titles seem plucked from a focus group, almost as corny as the film’s yassified talking animals. But perhaps it doesn’t matter much: CGI overwhelms most of the musical sequences anyway. Boasting a $150 million budget, these numbers could shine if real dancers had been given the proper MGM musical treatment, but Chu sticks to his blockbuster guns, favoring lifeless spectacle rather than incorporating homage to the classics.
And this is despite the fact that references to The Wizard of Oz become constant after Dorothy is slowly introduced into the proceedings. As with the Broadway musical, her face is never shown for a multitude of reasons: Wicked is not Dorothy’s story, it preserves Judy Garland’s image, and the approach heightens the film’s fairy tale qualities. In theory, Wicked should live or die without comparison to Victor Fleming’s classic, but for this writer, anytime the Tin Man, Toto, or Dorothy’s gingham dress showed up on screen, it was simply too hard not to reflect on that masterpiece — and this will likely be the case for a broad swath of viewers. Given that The Wizard of Oz is one of the most widely seen films in American history, airing annually on network television beginning in the 1950s and cementing its images deeply in the cultural imagination, perhaps this was always unavoidable. But given that even the briefest reference in Wicked pulls the mind back to the OG Oz film proves that little thought was put into how to mitigate such unfavorable comparisons.
More specifically problematic with For Good is that it feels like the kind of film that could have been directed by anyone. Chu’s vision never fully clarifies, unless by “vision” one means a relentless devotion to outsized spectacle. The movie carries the big budget gloss of the director’s previous films like Step Up 2: The Streets (2008), In the Heights (2021), and Crazy Rich Asians (2018), but it lacks anything resembling a personal touch or a cinematic heartbeat. Die-hard fans of the musical may object to such critiques, but nostalgia can’t be the glue holding everything together. The emotional spine of Wicked needed be the deep bond between Elphaba and Glinda, but even that feels flattened by not just an overarching grandiosity that makes little space for intimacy, but also by bad, clichéd writing. Wicked: For Good is ultimately an authorless film, just another blockbuster that mistakes maximalism for meaning.
DIRECTOR: Jon M. Chu; CAST: Ariana Grande, Cynthia Erivo, Jonathan Bailey, Ethan Slater; DISTRIBUTOR: Universal Pictures; IN THEATERS: November 21; RUNTIME: 2 hr. 18 min.
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