As an angry mob rises against the Wicked Witch, Glinda and Elphaba will need to come together one final time. With their singular friendship now the fulcrum of their futures, they will need to truly see each other, with honesty and empathy, if they are to change themselves, and all of Oz, for good.

This sure is an adaptation of Wicked’s second act—for worse or, well, for good. Everything that fundamentally doesn’t work about the second half of the stage show still doesn’t work here. Plot lines are dropped, characters walk in and out of the film willy-nilly, and it’s all just a bit of a mess.  

Sure, the movie tries to bridge over some of those potholes, and it does make some improvements to Act Two’s plot line. But the whole thing is entirely hampered by a fear/aversion/inability to actually include scenes from The Wizard of Oz—scenes that are vital to understanding Glinda and Elphaba’s respective motivations and the relationship with each other in the narrative’s most important moments. 

I’d happily cut both of those new songs in favor of seeing Glinda’s scene with Dorothy in Munchkinland and a scene of Elphaba actually being wicked toward Dorothy before she captures her at the end. Alas, it’s not to be, and the film falls apart in exactly the same ways the stage version does. 

Nevertheless. Wicked: For Good does offer an improvement to the stage version, and it’s a fun enough watch led by truly captivating performances from Erivo, Grande, and Bailey. Just adjust your expectations; this is nowhere near as good as the first one was—and it never stood a chance at being so. 

(P.S.: Stephen Schwartz, please stop revisiting your seminal works 20 years later and adding terrible new songs to them. This happened once with the stage version of The Prince of Egypt, and it’s happened again with this film version of Wicked: For Good. Enough is enough.)

3 out of 5 wands.