Though admittedly a financial no-brainer – two Christmastime tentpoles are better than one – it was always a gamble splitting the Wicked adaptation in two parts. Yes, you get to send audiences hurtling out of Part 1 on an incredible high by closing with ‘Defying Gravity’, but now you have to turn the play’s infamously weaker and weirder second act into a film all of its own. It’s a mighty challenge to which Wicked For Good largely does not rise, the loss of the school days charm of the first half exposing the very flimsy acting and filmmaking fundamentals that were just about an overlook-able problem in the first half but now, in Part 2, prove near fatal.
Picking up about a year after Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) split from Glinda (Ariana Grande) to rebel against the charlatan Wizard of Oz (Jeff Goldblum), we find Elphaba fully immersed in her ‘Wicked Witch of the West’ persona, waging magical guerrilla war against the Wizard’s forces to liberate Oz and its oppressed talking animals. Meanwhile, Glinda has been promoted into a sort of puppet queen position, the pink public face of the Wizard and his chief magician Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh), while loveable himbo Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey) has been promoted to captain of the Wizard’s guard and is torn between our two leading witchy ladies.
Like a lot of For Good’s story, all this set-up is rushed and low-impact, forced to get itself out of the way quickly to make room for the arrival of the actual Wizard of Oz story to happen around it, a problem that Winnie Holzman and Dana Fox’s script can’t find an answer for. Dorothy (who we never see the face of) and Toto’s arrival and quest bust up For Good’s pacing completely, everything now forced to clumsily fit itself into this pre-existing tale regardless of whether it suits the journey of the characters we’re actually meant to care about.
In Part 1, everyone’s stories belonged to them and were neatly intermingled; now everything is much bittier and feels more arbitrary. It’s a problem that brings down not just For Good’s own writing, but also the suddenly more confused performances. Erivo remains a powerful lead – ‘No Good Deed’ is no ‘Defying Gravity’, but, in her hands, it is still a stirring showstopper – and Goldblum is having fun, but Grande, still belting out tunes but no longer allowed to be particularly funny, stumbles in her non-singing segments, and the support fare no better. Bailey, too, suffers from his character’s newfound darkness while also not making a particularly impressive go of his musical numbers, while Yeoh does such a horrible job on both the speaking and singing fronts that she might have to give back that Oscar.
As any fan of the original musical would tell you, the back half of Wicked is not where the best songs lie, and so it proves. ‘No Good Deed’ has plenty of oomph and the eponymous ‘For Good’ is a touching duet for Erivo and Grande to share the finale with, but the songbook as a whole is much, much less catchy than Part 1 and nothing is staged with any particular flair. Returning director Jon M Chu (the films were shot back to back) continues to get in his own way with a lot of the numbers, and the washed-out colour grade of Part 1 hasn’t been made any more vibrant here (though I did feel that the lighting was considerably better this time out).
If you’re a Wicked die-hard then, of course, For Good is unmissable and even if you just mildly enjoyed the last one, there is some fun to be had here in watching these characters transform from their humble-ish origins into some of the most enduring icons in cinema history. Yet, this walk down the Yellow Brick Road is plagued with so many stumbles and forced reverence for a tale that it, frankly, only ever clashes with. I was never bored here, but I was frustrated very often.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 