"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, stolidly antifascist politics, and digitally shellacked song-and-dance spectacle, the director Jon M. Chu brought the curtain down on a high note. Soaring on a broomstick over the Emerald City, Elphaba Thropp (Cynthia Erivo)-green of flesh, pointy of hat, unfailingly pure of heart-ascended to the peak of her magical powers and struck fear into her enemies."

""I'm flying high, defying gravity!" she sang, while also flying in the faces of the Wizard of Oz (Jeff Goldblum), a totalitarian humbug, and her complicit frenemy, Glinda (Ariana Grande), 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 fearmongering authoritarian regime. What a world, what a world. The End."

"If only. The source material here is the long-running stage musical "Wicked," which was itself an artificially sweetened adaptation of Gregory Maguire's far darker 1995 novel, "Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West." On Broadway, it took two and a half hours, plus a fifteen-minute intermission, for the show to disgorge its story-an elaborate, through-a-witch's-eye prequel to the classic L. Frank Baum novel "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" and its immortal 1939 film adaptation."

Wicked: For Good continues the musical’s retelling of Oz by expanding the stage show into a two-part cinematic saga that substantially increases running time. Cynthia Erivo’s Elphaba and Ariana Grande’s Glinda provide contrasting central performances that drive the emotional core. The narrative centers on antifascist politics and the framing of Elphaba as a scapegoated dissident opposing an authoritarian Wizard. Filmmaking choices favor glossy digital effects, large-scale choreography, and melodramatic staging that often overwhelm character nuance. The split into two films produces uneven pacing and a sense of narrative bloat, while darker novel elements are softened.

Read at The New Yorker