'Wicked: For Good' Doesn't Understand the World of Oz

Let's get the truth out of the way. I'm not a Wicked fan. It's a story that works better on stage than on the big screen. The Wizard of Oz holds great reverence for its technical achievements, timeless songs, and simple story that works only in one film. There are other tales of Oz that L. Frank Baum has written. About fourteen total. Why not make a movie about any of those? Is it because they'd be too similar to Return to Oz? Where magic is replaced with horror? If the Broadway musical Wicked was adapted from a 1995 novel, did the musical end as idiotically as this film did?

There's nothing more wicked than tampering with the source material. The Wizard of Oz is an 86-year-old film. It's obvious from these movies that the filmmakers hold The Wizard of Oz in incredible high regard. So why try to stick your finger in what is sacred? Even as a non-Wizard of Oz fan, what the story does to the material is lazy fan pandering that veers toward bastardization. For as much as Wicked doesn't hold up to my personal taste, I could understand why fans liked it. The music was forgettable to me, but Cynthia Orivo's voice is phenomenal. There's a reason her high note from the very end of the film was played in every major sports game to the point that it made me want to fly on a broomstick just to get away from the ads.

There's a charm to the movie that tells a good, singular story, albeit one with lazy allegories about bigotry. The film plays like a coming-of-age story about how one became a PETA member and how a friendship went from an inseparable bond to a celebration of one person's death (that's not a spoiler if you've seen an 86-year-old film). The movie does a nice, simple job of telling an origin story. It tackles heavy themes with enough delicacy and charm reminiscent of the original Oz that other directors failed to replicate. The movie ends on a perfect note for a single movie, leaving the audience to fill in the blanks.

The Wizard of Oz is so ubiquitous that sequels are frivolous to make unless you want to make money. Nobody will ever live up to it because it's taken a life of its own. Yet one can try their damndest to pay homage to it without ripping it off. Wicked did that. Wicked: For Good, doesn't.

There's really no reason for this story to exist. And if it were to exist, the filmmakers should go further. If Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) has gone mad with evil, let's see her do some heinous things. In the beginning, we get a taste of that. Still, the big studio hands at Universal don't want a Disney Return to Oz situation, so everything has to be as light as possible, and the Wonderful World of Oz, originally conceived as an entire part of this earth, has been reduced to the three prime locations from the 1939 film. Although the friendship between Elphaba and Glinda (Ariana Grande) broke off, there still BFFs? Doesn't that defeat the purpose of the first film? Then there's the structure.

The movie is all over the place. Within its first 30 minutes, it cuts to three separate plotlines. The story is a smorgasbord of events that lead up to a JJ Abrams retread instead of anything meaningful. I guess the meaning we can take from this is that the Wicked Witch was misunderstood? Oh, boo hoo! Please give me something other than what Sam Raimi and Marvel have done with their villains over the last twenty-four years.

Suppose you're not a fan of musicals, films like La La Land, and South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut might change your mind. Wicked: For Good won't. It's a mismatch of forgettable numbers sung with incredible talent. The most annoying aspect of musicals is when they stretch the movie's length just to repeat a point that could have been made with one line of dialogue. It's a painful datenight for anyone whose partner is a Wicky and for the Wickan themselves. Once the hype dies down and they’ve really thought about the film. From its sloppy structure, pointless friendship plot, and lazy retread of the source material, Wicked: For Good might be the end of the Wicked series, but there's so much more from L. Frank Baum's library can be adapted.