Review: Despite abundance of talent, ‘Wicked’ finale runs out of magic

By Jake Coyle | Associated Press

Give us a clock tick” is an expression uttered several times in “Wicked: For Good.” But Jon M. Chu’s two-part musical has asked for quite a bit more than that.

Together, the two halves of this “Wicked” adaptation have run 297 minutes, which, more than the threat of lions and tigers and bears, is enough to make any moviegoer not entirely bewitched by the “Wizard of Oz” revision breathe a sigh of “Oh, my.”

So it’s a lot of clock ticks, quite a few more than the stage musical, which had roughly half the runtime. But “Wicked” has always been a spectacle of scale: power ballads and sprawling sets, all in retina-testing technicolor. Muchness is part of the point of “Wicked,” a song-and-dance assault of allegory and anthems relayed with an earnestness that you might call endearing if you’re good or tiresome if you’re, well, you know.

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For anyone in the former camp who somehow felt last year’s part one wasn’t enough, “For Good” will probably be a very welcoming second helping. Since these films were shot at the same time, much of the tone and tenor of the first chapter continues in “For Good.” There’s more Cynthia Erivo, more Ariana Grande and more soaring soliloquies. For most “Wicked” fans, more is good.

But for those of us who felt — what’s a non-wicked way to say this? — mildly waterboarded, in pink and green, by “Wicked,” “For Good” doesn’t offer much relief. There is, to be sure, great talent on display in these films, particularly in the case of Erivo. But “For Good,” like its predecessor, often feels more like a Production than a movie, with characters shuffled on and offstage with Oz-like orchestration.

That may be an unavoidable aspect of a pop amalgamation like “Wicked.” This is a big-screen adaptation of a 2003 stage musical (Winnie Holzman and Stephen Schwartz) based on a 1995 book (Gregory Maguire) inspired by a 1939 movie (Victor Fleming and company) and the original 1900 “The Wizard of Oz” by L. Frank Baum. More than a century of American entertainment is packed inside “Wicked.”

So, yes, “The Wizard of Oz” is basically history at this point. And that was much of the wit of Maguire’s book, which took Baum’s Oz and imagined that all of its apparent dichotomies — the vilified Wicked Witch of the West, the perfect Glinda the Good Witch, the powerful Wizard — were mere propaganda. If history is a set of falsehoods agreed upon, then Oz, too, is a lie.

Those political metaphors move to the forefront in “For Good.” Having spent much of part one filling in the backstory of Elphaba (Erivo) and Glinda (Grande) as classmates at Shiz University, the second chapter finds Oz in an increasingly agitated state. Elphaba, demonized as the Wicked Witch of the West, is now living in exile.

“Shield your children,” trumpets the government messaging. “Trust no animals!”

While the Yellow Brick Road is laid down, like railroad tracks on the frontier in an industrial haze, the hunt for Elphaba ratchets up. A travel ban is put in effect for animals and Munchkins, alike. Oz, it’s said, is “a place that seems to be devolving.”

No one above the age of 10 will fail to miss the target of these references. “Wicked: For Good” isn’t shy about them, and that frankness — and the movie’s ardent belief in empathy and multiculturalism — is both the film’s most stirring and most heavy-handed trait. Each iteration of “Wicked” has come with its own political relevancy. Maguire, himself, was influenced by the drumbeat leading up the Gulf War. “For Good” may be the most pointed and timely interpretation yet. Some of that is woven into the play, and some of it is expanded upon in Holzman’s and Dana Fox’s script, which pads the second act with a little more minor character development and a pair of new songs.

The catchiest tunes (“Popular,” Defying Gravity”) are in the rearview, though. Instead, “Wicked: For Good” is all storm clouds and rebellion, as Elphaba mounts a resistance to the Wizard (Jeff Goldblum) and Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh). Characters like Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey), captain of the Wizard’s guard, are forced to pick a side.

Considering the source material of the 1939 classic — old Hollywood at the very height of its powers — you would think Oz would come through clearly as a setting, only seen from a different perspective. But despite Chu’s energetic handling of earlier films like “In the Heights” and “Crazy Rich Asians,” “Wicked: For Good” struggles to really orient us in a place. When Dorothy and Toto drop in (they’re seen only from afar), you almost yearn for the clear pathway they begin skipping down.

Instead, “Wicked: For Good,” rather than conjuring Oz anew, always feels like it’s jumping from one set piece to another. Maybe this is a silly gripe for a fantasyland. (“I don’t have any idea where the offices of the Lollipop Guild are!”) But I rarely found myself lifted into a movie world, but rather sat watching it — sometimes with admiration, rarely with delight — from the mezzanine. The rub of going for maximum effect all the time is that the actors never have a chance to simply be.

All the momentum that “Wicked: For Good” does gather is owed significantly to its stars. To a large degree, these movies have been the Erivo-and-Grande show, a grand spectacle of female friendship that rises above all the petty biases and misjudgments to forge a vision of harmony in opposites. It’s a compelling vision, and Chu, as he did in the triumphant “Defying Gravity” culmination of part one, knows how to stick the landing.

Grande is best at the (too few) comic moments, like a brief impression of Margaret Hamilton’s cackle. But it’s Erivo who really elevates the material. Her Elphaba seems to both believe in the hopeful possibility of “Wicked” and fear its impossibility. When she melancholily sings one of the new songs, “No Place Like Home,” Erivo appears to grasp that it’s going to take more than a click of the heels, or tick of the clock, to get there.

‘WICKED’

2 stars out of 4

Rating: PG (some scary action, thematic material, brief suggestive material)

Starring: Cynthia Erivo, Ariana Grande, Jonathan Bailey, Michelle Yeoh, Jeff Goldblum

Director: Jon M. Chu

Running time: 2 hours, 17 minutes

When & where: Opens Friday in theaters