Wicked For Good movie review: An impressive exploration of goodness and wickedness

That would have also kept the film, already overblown because of its flimsier first part, manageably short. As it is, while there are many moments where Grande and Arivo, and Jeff Goldblum as the Wizard, seize your attention, For Good also tends to meander.

It begins with Elphaba or the Wicked Witch of the West living hidden in the forest, being chased by all of Oz, even as Glinda is finding her satin-slippered feet as the flouncy-gowned, pink bubble-inhabiting, shiny glass wand-bearing good girl of Oz whom everyone loves.

Grande is effective in conveying the girl who has finally got all that her child and teen self always wanted, but whose head lies uneasy under the “good” crown’s emptiness.

Some of it is due to the fact that, unlike the myth weaved by Madame Morrible (Yeoh) — the Oz’s ‘Press Secretary’ — Glinda has little, including magic, going for her other than her beauty. A lot has to do with the fact that she knows Elphaba is not bad, and the Wizard not all that good — and she must ignore all this to live her dream.

Yeoh is all sweet sorcery and malicious magic, and Bailey as the love interest of both Glinda and Elphaba is a pleasing if unnecessary second fiddle (which is great for a film essentially about two women, who don’t need anyone other).

As those two women, Grande and Erivo pull off their pas de deux with elan. Grande is more assured this time and Erivo, who carried the first film, matures wonderfully as a person who has all her life been misunderstood. The rest of Wizard of Oz’s characters, The Tin Man, the Scarecrow, the Cowardly Lion, and Dorothy and Toto, are rolled out in quick, and rather economical, succession.

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That pace would have been good for Grande and Erivo too, but the film directed by Jon M Chu is too reluctant to let them go.

If the two are upstaged, at any time, it is by Goldblum, who is dazzling as the “fake, hokum” ‘His Ozness’ Wizard, a rich old man with ostentatious taste and a good head of hair, who sings to the world: “The truth is not a fact or reason / The truth is just what everyone agrees on… It’s all in which label is able to persist.”

Wicked For Good movie director: Jon M Chu
Wicked For Good movie cast: Cynthia Erivo, Ariana Grande, Jonathan Bailey, Jeff Goldblum, Michelle Yeoh
Wicked For Good movie rating: 3.5

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