Brief thoughts on WIcked: For Good (2025)

After seeing the film I texted my friend Randi with my pull quote "Oh for f#%@s sake".

Yea, I didn't much care for it. 

I may have had issues with the first film, but it had sequences that soared and genunely moved me. This is just a series of missteps that never work and expand the plot just ways that simply feel like filler.

The film is an expanded version of the second act of the Broadway show. The film runs over an hour longer than the second act. The film picks up with the building of the yellow brick road as the "wicked witch" frees the animals and battles the forces of the Wizard.  It takes us to the end of the story.

Its not bad, as such, just badly constructed (everything is stretched to fill time) and directed (John Chu cannot direct musicals). It's a soulless film that exists to make money not to really tell a meaningful story. Its the same brain dead Hollywood thinking that turned JRR Tolkien's Hobbit into three rambling three hour films instead of one. It's a film set in and around sets that look and like the rotting CGI corpse of a whale spray painted pink and green. Almost nothing looks real and when it does it looks wrong.

To be honest, I could dismantle almost everything in this film, but whats the point? I don't have time to take the film to task point by point and moment to moment; besides you are either going to love the film or dislike the revisions (this now is barely connected to the Baum story), the poor direction (don't get me started - everything is bad), and the totally forgetable new songs that exist not to move the story,  but fill time. Either way you don't  need my words you can love or hate it on your own (though I want to see Riff Trax dismantle this, largely to see if they do it funnier than my off the cuff stream of jokes)

I will say that the last two minutes of the film moved me- mostly not because of anything that happened in the film but what I carried in from the play and from the original stories and every Oz story that I have seen over the course of my life, but not from the film itself. And because Cynthia Erivo final has material to finally to make Elphaba human and not a blown up larger than life musical theater caricature playing to the back rows. Its only in those fleeting two minutes that she is finally shot up close and in such away that her humanity isn't lost on vast artificial sets. Finally, after 5 hours of total screen time, she stops being far away and larger then life and comes down to earth to move us without the larger than life trappings of long dead money grabbing machine.

This is a film that may get awards but only because of the campaigns and not because it deserves it.

WICKED FOR GOOD is not so much bad but misguided to the point that it's just not worth discussing