“This isn’t going to make sense, but there’s a house and it’s flying through the sky.” You said it, Elphaba.
Wicked—the first installment in the two-part film adaptation of the Broadway musical (itself an adaptation of Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel)—was hardly a paragon of popular entertainment, yet as a showcase for a pair of powerhouse lead performances, it had some magic. Wicked: For Good suggests this all may have been a doomed project from the very beginning.
Devoid of dance numbers and memorable songs, Wicked: For Good takes the whiff of an idea—what if the Wicked Witch of the West wasn’t so bad?—and fails to creatively or coherently imagine it in almost any way. Perhaps Maguire’s novel manages this; my faint memories of seeing the musical twice are that the spectacle papered over it (as the first Wicked movie largely does). Here, as Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo), Glinda (Ariana Grande), and shared love interest Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey) negotiate their personal and political allegiances amidst an increasingly fascist Oz, the bottom falls out completely. Wicked: For Good holds no interior logic, for its own narrative or any of its characters—all the more so once it begins to painfully shoehorn elements from 1939’s The Wizard of Oz into the final third. Nearly everything happens not out of some unified vision, but because … well … now what are we going to do with the Scarecrow?
Everyone onscreen is left to flounder, from the previously impervious Jeff Goldblum to poor Michelle Yeoh to the two stars, whose considerable charisma and chemistry sustained the first film. (Not even Erivo can save “No Good Deed,” which I don’t believe technically counts as a song.) If their characters increasingly make little sense, neither do the aesthetic decisions. There is a moment where Erivo’s Elphaba and Grande’s Glinda share a seat on a swing and they pass through a green lighting scheme, then a pink one. Thematically, I get it, but the result makes both actors look like rancid cheese under a heat lamp. Returning director Jon M. Chu and cinematographer Alice Brooks also continue to employ the artificial, omnipresent, computer-generated “sun” that drove so many viewers nuts the first time around.
And so it’s ugly and tuneless, with characters whose actions are so arbitrary as to render any consideration of what it means to be “good” or “wicked” meaningless. I’m open to revisionist fairy tales–see Maleficent—but after all the books, stage productions, and movies, Wicked: For Good makes me wish we had left the Wicked Witch of the West alone.
(11/26/2025)
