"Wicked: For Good"

 ☆☆☆

Now, wait just a clock tick.

On Broadway, Wicked runs 2 hours, 30 minutes with a 15-minute intermission. On film, Wicked: Part 1 and Wicked: For Good together run two minutes shy of five hours. And despite finding much to enjoy about the first movie, now that I've seen the second, the big question the two films together leave behind is simply: Why?

It was easy to forgive the first movie its excesses, at least watching it the first time. Like many admirers of the Broadway spectacle on which it's based, the film version had been two decades coming, and it was a thrill to see Elphaba and G(a)linda brought to life by Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande-Butera. But on an at-home rewatch, the movie lost its lightness, and labored under all that had been added to it.

The swirling CGI shots of Oz, the dizzying and impossible camerawork made possible by visual effects, the expansive scenery, the elongated musical sequences all overwhelmed the story and even the performances. Even last year, I had been worried about Part 2 of Wicked, and there was good reason to be.

The director, John M. Chu, is fond of excess in everything, and has turned the 60-minute second act of Wicked into 138 minutes of grandiosity. Everything in Wicked: For Good (a nonsensical title, since the first movie was simply subtitled Part 1) is big, big, big. Big. Very big. Except the emotions.

And this is the crux of the problem with the Wicked sequel — instead of focusing on the internal struggles of its two main characters, instead of watching them grapple with the unintended and enormously problematic consequences of the choices they made in the first part, the film version of Wicked piles story point upon story point upon story point, adding in massive visual effects sequences (including a specific visual reference to 1939's The Wizard of Oz that is super-brief and super-clever), until Elphaba and Glinda are almost buried.

On stage, the biggest visual effect in Wicked is a black-draped performer being lifted on a hidden cherry picker. It's low-tech, but boy does it work. On screen, the biggest visual effect in Wicked is, well, all of them. They're all high-tech, and very few of them work. They take us out of the story, they revel in their excess, and they suffocate what on stage becomes a surprisingly intimate exploration of the two character searching their souls to justify their actions.

What should move snappily plods along, with two shockingly bland — and also unnecessary — new songs that add nothing to the story but pad out the running time even further. The emotional beats rarely land, in part because they're staged so awkwardly. When Elphaba sings to her lover about her feelings as they lay together in post-coital bliss, the film chooses to have her walking anxiously away from him before they've even touched each other ... even though the lyrics are about their physical proximity.

Because the movie spends so much time away from Elphaba and Glinda, it also makes some of the stage musical's weakest points even weaker. On stage, the integration of the original Wizard of Oz characters is clunky and rather non-sensical (why would the Scarecrow, knowing now who he actually is, at least in this story, join the little Kansas girl on the mission to kill that particular witch?). The movie's production design recalls a lot of the 1939 film, but then ignores both that movie and the original story by having Elphaba (the Wicked Witch of the West, after all) nowhere near Munchkinland when Dorothy arrives.

The stage musical moves along so briskly that there's no time to worry about questions like this. The movie gets so granular about the detail, it leaves only time to ponder such peculiarities.

Only when the movie gets to its climactic number, the titular For Good, are both Erivo and Grande-Butera really given the opportunity to shine — and they take it. Even if Chu's framing favors far too many close ups and too much cutting, these two performers show us why they're so right for the roles, and for just a minute have us really believing in the characters, the deep emotion of an objectively moving song, and in the relationship that should be the centerpiece of both movies.

By that point, it's been a long time coming. A very long time. But for those few minutes, Wicked: For Good, thanks to its stars, delivers real movie magic — the kind we came for, and the kind Wicked deserved to have much, much more of.

Viewed November 23, 2025 — AMC Burbank 16

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