Oz the Great and Powerful

Directed by Sam Raimi

**

(PG)

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Saying that this expensive prequel to The Wizard of Oz has its heart in the right place “isn’t the same thing as saying it’s actually good,” said Andrew O’Hehir in Salon.com. Designed to play like an old-fashioned family-friendly Hollywood adventure, it’s instead “a lumbering, bloated spectacle” weighed down by a weak script and “a flat, awkward central performance.” James Franco stars as a two-bit magician who’s greeted as a savior when a tornado lifts him over the rainbow to the magical land of Oz, and the actor “never finds a way to make the wizard pop,” said Manohla Dargis in The New York Times. In fact, once a flying monkey and a talking doll join him on his journey, he “looks pretty pained in most of his scenes with them.” Worse, though, is what’s become of Oz’s heroines, said Elizabeth Weitzman in the New York Daily News. Dorothy’s been excised from this story completely, of course, while the three ruling witches—played by Mila Kunis, Rachel Weisz, and Michelle Williams—are cast as “wide-eyed weaklings,” helpless without a man. “It’s depressing to watch.”