The back half of Stephen Schwartz and Winnie Holzman\u2019s musical, adapted from the 1995 novel by Gregory Maguire and itself a retelling of The Wizard of Oz<\/a> that questions the wickedness of the Witch of the West, was always a bit of a slog. And Jon M Chu\u2019s direction, even with all that budget and talent at hand, fails to find a satisfactory fix.<\/p>\n Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo<\/a>), the witch in question, has already declared herself a rebel with a cause, via the last film\u2019s climactic \u201cDefying Gravity\u201d. Part two, then, must deal with the drier, more bureaucratic business of getting us from that revelation to her predestined meeting with a bucket of water thrown by a homesick Kansas native.<\/p>\n And so we\u2019re reintroduced to her, out in Oz, rallying the marginalised animals of the land to stay and fight for what\u2019s rightly theirs, all while her former frenemy-turned-bestie Glinda (Grande) stays behind with the Wizard (Jeff Goldblum) and his right-hand woman Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh), the guilt of her own inaction brewing like a fish in a percolator. She knows, deep down, she\u2019s upholding a corrupt system, but the perks (one of them being 2025\u2019s Sexiest Man Alive<\/a>, Jonathan Bailey, as her fianc\u00e9 Fiyero) are hard to resist.<\/p>\n But these are all essentially foregone conclusions by the end of the first film. For Good has little sense of movement, literally or emotionally \u2013 no profound revelations, no wonder or spectacle. All that\u2019s to be done now is for each character to process, via standardised ballad, what they\u2019ve learned, as they wander aimlessly around dimly lit woods or millennial-pink bedrooms, in the same cycle of mid-shots and close-ups.<\/p>\n Stephen Schwartz\u2019s new song for Elphaba, \u201cNo Place Like Home\u201d, is certainly effective in the blunt force of its sincerity \u2013 Erivo handles its emotions beautifully (and, as always, hits every note with ease), embracing wholeheartedly what it means for a queer Black woman to sing the words \u201chow do I love this place that\u2019s never loved me?\u201d. Grande, however, feels less served by \u201cThe Girl in the Bubble\u201d. And, while she\u2019s a perfect Glinda in her comedic moments, that\u2019s a little less true of the character when she\u2019s hit rock bottom.<\/p>\n Wicked\u2019s ability to hold up as an effective allegory for the fight for change from within and outside of the system (after all, there\u2019s always been a bit of Professor X\/Magneto dichotomy between Glinda and Elphaba), continually falters when it\u2019s hit with the excessive need to explain how things came to be. The Scarecrow, the Tin Man, the Cowardly Lion, Glinda\u2019s bubble, the yellow brick road, Dorothy\u2019s shoes \u2013 Wicked insists that every element of The Wizard of Oz has to be explained and demystified.<\/p>\n There\u2019s no room for magic there, nor in Chu\u2019s direction, which takes all of the boiling bitterness of Elphaba\u2019s \u201cNo Good Deed\u201d, her rage against her own fate, and sets it against a flat background of anonymous, sludge-hued castle walls and murky skies. I guess we should at least be thankful we\u2019ve been spared the monstrosity of a CGI-rendered Judy Garland as Dorothy (that said, there is some extremely disconcerting use of de-ageing tech elsewhere). But, as those witches might say, one good deed hardly changes things for the better.<\/p>\n Dir: Jon M Chu. Starring: Cynthia Erivo, Ariana Grande, Jonathan Bailey, Ethan Slater, Bowen Yang, Marissa Bode, Michelle Yeoh, Jeff Goldblum. Cert PG, 137 mins<\/p>\n \u2018Wicked: For Good\u2019 is in cinemas from 21 November<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Your support helps us to tell the story From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":270968,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[96,2839,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-270967","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-movies","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270967","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=270967"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270967\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/270968"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=270967"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=270967"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=270967"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Cynthia](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/2552_D053_00285R.jpeg\")
Cynthia Erivo and Jonathan Bailey in \u2018Wicked: For Good\u2019 (Universal Pictures)<\/p>\n