And we're back! Our national nightmare — the year-long wait between Jon M. Chu's Wicked: Part I and Wicked: For Good — has finally come to an end. When we last left Chu's splashy, long-awaited adaptation of the Broadway musical juggernaut, green emo outcast Elphaba, soon to be known as the Wicked Witch of the West (Cynthia Erivo), had been radicalized by the discovery that the revered Wizard of Oz (Jeff Goldblum) is a magicless fraud and oppressor of animals; she thus committed to defying gravity and becoming a broomstick-riding outlaw. Her polar-opposite enemy-turned-bestie Glinda (Ariana Grande) declined to take up the cause but wished Elphaba well. Songs were belted, hearts were broken, blonde hair was tossed, and since then, the real world we're all existing in only grew more chaotic and distressingly parallel to that of the one depicted in Oz.
Wicked: For Good is based on the show's second act, and ever since it was announced that the two hour and 45-minute production (including intermission) would be sprawled across two separate films totaling an approximate five-hour runtime, people like me have wondered, What's the (non-capitalistic) point of that? Having now seen For Good, I can attest there isn't a point, or at least not a wholly convincing one. This installment is far from a total misfire — thank goodness Erivo and Grande are such captivating performers perfectly-suited to these roles — but the over-padding and stuffing meant to justify this bifurcated packaging soon becomes readily apparent.
First, however, it starts off with a bang: The exciting opening sequence touches down upon the vast open landscape outside the metropolis of Oz, as the Wizard's human lackeys are forcing animals to do the brutal labor of building his precious yellow brick road; suddenly, Elphaba appears out of the sky like a superhero and wields her mighty powers to disrupt the abuse and send a message. The Wizard's press secretary Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh, tasked again with trying to sing, to limited results) has pulled out all the stops to spread hateful propaganda about Elphaba to the people of Oz, and the people are buying it wholesale. A willfully ignorant Glinda is now the bubbly spokesperson for the Wizard's regime, keeping the lie about his wizarding credentials alive. And the formerly apathetic Fiyero (Sexiest Man Alive Jonathan Bailey) is now a reluctant guardsman arranged to marry Glinda, even though his heart and political sympathies remain with Elphaba.
A lot happens over the next two-plus hours, including the story coinciding with the arrival of that girl from Kansas (glimpsed a few times here, but as far as I can remember, not heard), and it's entertaining enough. The highest notes carry over from Part 1, as Erivo and Grande are electric every time they share screentime — their big comical fight, which takes place immediately after a devastating cyclone of events, elicited rapturous engagement from the audience at my screening. And their duet "For Good" remains the Act II apex, a stirring meeting of the minds and declaration of friendship, even if lyricist Stephen Schwartz's prose leans toward clunk. (Two decades later, I'm still scratching my head at "Like a seed dropped by a skybird / In a distant wood." Huh???)
If For Good doesn't soar quite as consistently as Part 1, this is at least partially by design. A song from the original show like the Wizard's vaudevillian ditty "Wonderful" — a more sinister retread of Glinda's far superior ode to the benefits of self-mythologizing, "Popular" — can't come close to matching Act I's abundance of bangers. (And unfortunately, the two new songs added here, Elphaba's "No Place Like Home" and Glinda's "The Girl in the Bubble," add little beyond runtime.) Act II is also where the show's politics become indecipherable, or — to put it less generously — noncommittal. The story aims to challenge perceptions of what makes someone "good" or "bad," but unlike its source material, Gregory Maguire's revisionist novel Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, the new movie sands down those provocations to make certain characters more sympathetic than they are.
But within the landscape of movie musicals, especially more recent examples, both Wicked movies serve as a triumph and tribute to creative fortitude. We've all laughed (and cringed) a lot about Erivo and Grande's peculiar antics throughout this never-ending publicity cycle, but there's something heartwarming about their deep commitment to the spirit of the material. Whatever your feelings about it, this is clearly a spectacle that's been made with love, and that's all for the better.
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