Film review: Wicked: For Good is short on fun and cinematic magic
Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba and Ariana Grande as Glinda in Wicked: For Good
★★★☆☆
‘I want to be magical for real,’ declares Glinda the Good (Ariana Grande) as (PG) begins, and really, it’s difficult not to sympathise with her plight.Â
Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo), the Wicked Witch of the West, has returned from the exile imposed at the end of (2024) to terrorise the peace-loving burghers of Oz with her scurrilous allegations that the Wizard (Jeff Goldblum) is a fraud.Â
Glinda, the public face of the Wizard’s charm offensive, is given various baubles (a wand, a pink bubble to waft about in) to help her persuade the gullible she is possessed of the magical powers required to defend Oz against Elphaba, but Glinda knows all too well that she is not magical, and nor is she intrinsically good.Â
Worse, she suspects that Elphaba is not only an instinctively good person who wishes to protect Oz and its citizens – human and animal – from the Wizard’s predations, but that Glinda’s fiancée Prince Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey) might be rooting for Team Elphaba.Â
Adapted from the smash Broadway musical by Winnie Holzman and Dana Fox, and directed by John M. Chu, this is a sequel that rather curiously decides to jettison the self-deprecating humour of the first outing for the sake of straight drama, in the process divesting itself of much of the original’s charm.Â
Ariana Grande (very funny in the first movie) is left playing a rather petulant and naïve shill for the Wizard’s tyranny, while Jeff Goldblum has little to do other than moodily stomp about, anticipating the worst.Â
In better news, Cynthia Erivo is terrific once more as the defiant Elphaba; alas, all the real show-stopping tunes were crammed into the original, which leaves the story struggling to manufacture truly moving emotional moments. Short on fun and cinematic magic, heavy on frou-frou frocks and unnecessary subplots, is for the completists only.Â
(theatrical release)Â
