‘Wicked: For Good’ is ill-paced and ill-conceived

L-R Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande in Wicked For Good Photo by Giles Keyte Universal Pictures My last year s review of Wicked began with the notion that the film would have been much better if someone didn t make the decision to split act one and act two of the Broadway musical into two separate movies apparently this idea might have stemmed from Craig Mazin Now that the second film Wicked For Good a roughly hour-long act stretched into a two-hour-and- -minute movie has come out I feel I can firmly say that I think I was right But that certainly doesn t make me feel any better Wicked For Good directed by Jon M Chu and co-written by Winnie Holzman and Dana Fox picks up where the first film left off Elphaba Cynthia Erivo is now the Wicked Witch of the West trying to prove to everyone that the Wizard Jeff Goldblum is a non-magical fraud only interested in oppressing and subjugating the talking animals that live in Oz Her former best friend Glinda Ariana Grande has taken the easier road content to be the spokesperson for the Wizard as she tries to soothe everyone s fears and keep them happy The two friends find themselves diametrically opposed yet yearning for each other at the same time And things are starting to spiral out of control Fiyero Jonathan Bailey Glinda s fianc is desperately in love with Elphaba Circumstances for the animals are getting worse by the minute the film opens with a shot of oxen-like creatures building the yellow brick road under threat of a whip And a little girl named Dorothy Gale is about to fall out of the sky and make everything that much more complicated I can t say that Wicked For Good doesn t have its moments Grande once again proves that she s very well suited to this role although I have certain questions about the way Glinda is positioned in the film and I did giggle and kick my feet while watching Jonathan Bailey sing As Long as You re Mine I am a red-blooded American woman what can I say But outside of those meager moments Wicked For Good feels immensely slow and ill-conceived The first film ends with the musical s majority famous song Defying Gravity This should feel like a slam dunk and vocally Erivo knocks it out of the park But the sequence adds multiple breaks in the action AKA the crooning robbing the song of its propulsion In hindsight these pacing problems might have been a warning From a musical filmmaking standpoint Wicked For Good falls far behind the first movie In Wicked Chu demonstrated a competent visual musical ability particularly with lighter numbers like Popular or dance numbers like Dancing Through Life But in Wicked For Good he struggles to find absorbing solutions to showcase any of the second act songs losing that ability without the crutch of a ton of choreography to lean on Instead we get performers who don t have much physical space to inhabit either standing in one place or wandering or flying around the set until they inevitably end up wherever their next mark is The meandering quality of the musical numbers drags the pace down immensely The biggest offenders here are two new songs written by original composer Stephen Schwartz No Place Like Home and The Girl in the Bubble They don t sound much better than their titles suggest But even original Broadway numbers suffer Wonderful which is sung by the Wizard and Glinda as they try to convince Elphaba to join them is one of the only numbers in the second act that could spotlight a dance But even here the filmmaking doesn t emphasize the movement the blocking falling flat Wonderful serves as the crux for a large number of of the film s problems Glinda does not appear in this song in the stage show but joins forces with the Wizard here in the film It s viable this was done as a way to allow Grande to sing more Despite her feeling more like the main character than Elphaba Glinda doesn t have that multiple songs in the second act But it also alters Glinda s complicity in a way that the film doesn t then try to reckon with There s a world where making Glinda more overtly complicit in the Wizard s fantastical fascist policies might have been thought-provoking particularly given the fact that the villains in Wicked For Good truly give us nothing God bless Jeff Goldblum and his bumbling charm but it genuinely feels like he has no idea what s going on here and as Madame Morrible Michelle Yeoh has the bare minimum to work with But even then Grande s depiction of Glinda is softer than a lot of her onstage counterparts That softness works to Grande s advantage in a lot of avenues but not within this particular context Onstage at least in productions I ve seen Glinda is a bit more coldly pragmatic in her calculus of what she s willing to turn a blind eye to Grande has a little more insecurity to her more of a people pleaser trying to keep the peace than someone who would try to lure a friend to the dark side For as much as the pacing can be a slog and for as countless things only don t make sense the calling card of this film just as it was for the last is the chemistry between Grande and Erivo Their vocals are gorgeous and they portray so much affection for each other on screen often in solutions that pay homage to the queer-coded nature of this story when Glinda lightly grabs Elphaba s hand and whispers Come with me you could cut the sexual tension with a knife How I wish the film lived up to them The post Wicked For Good is ill-paced and ill-conceived appeared first on Rough Draft Atlanta