Wicked: For Good

Having never seen the musical, I quite enjoyed the first of the two Wicked movies. The sequel picks up where we left off, with Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) now staging a one-witch-rebellion against the empire of Oz.

The plot gets messy fast, as Wicked: For Good attempts to account for the events of The Wizard of Oz with its own unique spin on what happened.

It’s a fun idea, but unfortunately, the pacing doesn’t quite work. Characters like Elphaba’s sister Nessa behave in ways that don’t make sense for the people we got to know in the first film. To borrow a phrase from Ryan George, the reason why people do things seems to be “so the movie can happen”.

The world of Wicked still looks dazzling, and Erivo is wonderfully expressive as Elphaba, making her character’s actions almost believable. Jeff Goldblum as the wizard gets to perform a great little number about truth and belief, and Ariana Grande-Butera lends her extraordinary vocal talents to, well, some rather middling lyrics.

It’s the writing that’s mostly at fault for things never really coming together. Aside from inconsistent pacing and implausible character developments, the score lacks musical numbers with the same verve that “Popular” or “Dancing Through Life” brought to part one. As a result, the movie feels unbalanced and overwrought.

Perhaps, if the producers had resisted the urge to split the story into two movies, it would have worked better. As it is, viewers of the first film will still want to see the sequel, but may wonder what could have been.