Is Wicked: For Good defying expectations?

“Even the staunchest defenders of ‘Wicked’, the stage musical about the tragic origins of The Wizard of Oz’s Witch of the West, would have to concede that it peaks just before the interval,” said The Telegraph’s Robbie Collin.

So splitting the screen adaptation in two meant that the second instalment, the newly released “Wicked: For Good”, was always “going to be a bit stingy”. The result “isn’t quite the worst-case scenario some of us were dreading”, but it’s not far off.

‘Little sense of movement’

If your complaint about “Wicked” was that “it was so oddly lit that you could barely see what was going on”, fret not, said The Independent’s Clarisse Loughrey. In “Wicked: For Good”, you’ll mind less because “there’s so little to look at”. Despite “all that budget and talent at hand”, the director John M. Chu “fails to find a satisfactory fix” for the back half of Stephen Schwartz and Winnie Holzman’s musical.

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

The supposedly wicked witch, Elphaba, (played by Cynthia Erivo) “declared herself a rebel with a cause” during the first film’s climactic “Defying Gravity”. Part Two must deal with the “drier, more bureaucratic business” of getting us from there to “her predestined meeting with a bucket of water thrown by a homesick Kansas native”. Her “former frenemy-turned-bestie Glinda” (played by Ariana Grande) remains with the Wizard (Jeff Goldblum) and her fiancé Prince Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey). “But these are all essentially foregone conclusions by the end of the first film.” The second has “little sense of movement, literally or emotionally”.

The “rush to include this ‘Wizard of Oz’ backstory” comes at the expense of “emotional authenticity”, said Francesca Steele in The i Paper. The two films were shot at the same time, and “supposedly turned into two” to maintain character development, but the 137-minute runtime is used less for characterisation than for “dazzling design”. Oscar-winning costume and production designers Paul Tazewell and Nathan Crowley have “clearly had an absolute ball again”, but the pace “feels slightly off”. Still, there’s a “lot more passion in this sequel, and a lot more darkness too”. When Erivo and Grande come together for the central duet “For Good”, they “remain a tour de force”.

‘Deeply lovely update’

“Wicked: For Good” takes us into the timeline of “The Wizard of Oz” with a “great deal of tragicomic brio”, said The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw. The focus narrows to two “interlocking love triangles”: one of Glinda the Good, Elphaba the Wicked and the Wizard – and the other consisting of Glinda, Elphaba and Fiyero, whom they both love. Goldblum is “excellent as the Wizard, who pretty much becomes the Darth Vader of Oz”. Bailey “pivots to a much more serious, less campy, more passionate Fiyero”, and Grande is, as ever, “delicate and doll-like as Glinda, though with less opportunity for comedy” as in part one.

Slightly odder is the “tangential appearance of Dorothy”, and the “little origin-myth-type backstories” of her eventual companions the Lion, the Tin Man and the Scarecrow. But this “manageably proportioned second half” maintains the “rainbow-coloured dreaminess and the Broadway show-tune zinginess” of the first half.

It surpasses part one in “verve, ambition and emotional ache”, said Kevin Maher in The Times. Purging “all the affable scene-setting” of its predecessor, it “arrives as a fiery love triangle between the Judy Garland classic, this deeply lovely update and the resonant ideas that bind them”. There are “audacious touches and additions”, such as the depiction of the yellow brick road as a “slavery-based project”. Schwartz’s new song for Elphaba, “No Place Like Home”, is “both a riposte to Garland’s ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ and an expression of the all-consuming paradox of the story”.

There are “sluggish moments”, including the new song for Glinda, and Michelle Yeoh is “wasted” as Madame Morrible, right-hand woman to the Wizard. But Erivo is “sublime”. She carries the “wounded essence of the entire project” in her “quiet despair”. It’s down to her that the film has a heart. “Best actress Oscar?”