If your complaint about last year’s Wicked was that it was so oddly lit that you could barely see what was going on, then fear not – in Wicked: For Good, you won’t mind so much, because there’s so little to look at. Here you’ll find no gallivanting between the whimsical towers of Shiz University, no rambunctious dance breaks, no Ariana Grande swinging from a chandelier.
The back half of Stephen Schwartz and Winnie Holzman’s musical, adapted from the 1995 novel by Gregory Maguire and itself a retelling of The Wizard of Oz that questions the wickedness of the Witch of the West, was always a bit of a slog. And Jon M Chu’s direction, even with all that budget and talent at hand, fails to find a satisfactory fix.
Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo), the witch in question, has already declared herself a rebel with a cause, via the last film’s climactic “Defying Gravity”. Part two, then, must deal with the drier, more bureaucratic business of getting us from that revelation to her predestined meeting with a bucket of water thrown by a homesick Kansas native.
And so we’re reintroduced to her, out in Oz, rallying the marginalised animals of the land to stay and fight for what’s rightly theirs, all while her former frenemy-turned-bestie Glinda (Grande) stays behind with the Wizard (Jeff Goldblum) and his right-hand woman Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh), the guilt of her own inaction brewing like a fish in a percolator. She knows, deep down, she’s upholding a corrupt system, but the perks (one of them being 2025’s Sexiest Man Alive, Jonathan Bailey, as her fiancé Fiyero) are hard to resist.
But these are all essentially foregone conclusions by the end of the first film. For Good has little sense of movement, literally or emotionally – no profound revelations, no wonder or spectacle. All that’s to be done now is for each character to process, via standardised ballad, what they’ve learned, as they wander aimlessly around dimly lit woods or millennial-pink bedrooms, in the same cycle of mid-shots and close-ups.
Stephen Schwartz’s new song for Elphaba, “No Place Like Home”, is certainly effective in the blunt force of its sincerity – Erivo handles its emotions beautifully (and, as always, hits every note with ease), embracing wholeheartedly what it means for a queer Black woman to sing the words “how do I love this place that’s never loved me?”. Grande, however, feels less served by “The Girl in the Bubble”. And, while she’s a perfect Glinda in her comedic moments, that’s a little less true of the character when she’s hit rock bottom.
Wicked’s ability to hold up as an effective allegory for the fight for change from within and outside of the system (after all, there’s always been a bit of Professor X/Magneto dichotomy between Glinda and Elphaba), continually falters when it’s hit with the excessive need to explain how things came to be. The Scarecrow, the Tin Man, the Cowardly Lion, Glinda’s bubble, the yellow brick road, Dorothy’s shoes – Wicked insists that every element of The Wizard of Oz has to be explained and demystified.
There’s no room for magic there, nor in Chu’s direction, which takes all of the boiling bitterness of Elphaba’s “No Good Deed”, her rage against her own fate, and sets it against a flat background of anonymous, sludge-hued castle walls and murky skies. I guess we should at least be thankful we’ve been spared the monstrosity of a CGI-rendered Judy Garland as Dorothy (that said, there is some extremely disconcerting use of de-ageing tech elsewhere). But, as those witches might say, one good deed hardly changes things for the better.
Dir: Jon M Chu. Starring: Cynthia Erivo, Ariana Grande, Jonathan Bailey, Ethan Slater, Bowen Yang, Marissa Bode, Michelle Yeoh, Jeff Goldblum. Cert PG, 137 mins
‘Wicked: For Good’ is in cinemas from 21 November
