{"id":188267,"date":"2025-11-19T03:37:08","date_gmt":"2025-11-19T03:37:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/188267\/"},"modified":"2025-11-19T03:37:08","modified_gmt":"2025-11-19T03:37:08","slug":"for-good-review-ariana-grande-and-cynthia-erivo-almost-save-this-deflated-prequel-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/188267\/","title":{"rendered":"For Good review \u2013 Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo almost save this deflated prequel \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

Wicked: For Good<\/strong> <\/p>\n

\ue9d9 \ue9d9 \ue9d7 \ue9d7 \ue9d7<\/strong> <\/p>\n

Director:<\/strong> Jon M Chu<\/p>\n

Cert:<\/strong> PG<\/p>\n

Starring:<\/strong> Ariana Grande, Cynthia Erivo, Jonathan Bailey, Ethan Slater, Michelle Yeoh, Jeff Goldblum<\/p>\n

Running Time:<\/strong> 2 hrs 17 mins<\/p>\n

At the close of Wicked<\/a>, the first film in this two-part musical story, Cynthia Erivo<\/a>, as the newly dubbed Wicked Witch of the West, sent even sceptics buzzing from the cinema with her rousing rendition of Defying Gravity. Those attending the original stage production were, after a swift gin and tonic, still aloft as they returned from the interval.<\/p>\n

Jon M Chu<\/a> and team have set themselves a greater challenge in restarting the story a whole year after Erivo crested the clouds. It doesn\u2019t help that the story\u2019s second act is famously weaker than the first: messier, shorter on momentum, less abundant in big tunes.<\/p>\n

Wicked: For Good will, most likely, satisfy those wedded to the show as others are wedded to religion. Erivo and Ariana Grande<\/a>, playing misunderstood goth and insufferable prom queen, remain a well-cast complementary partnership. If you bought the first film\u2019s brash visual aesthetic \u2013 the result of a giant toddler vomiting candyfloss all over Walt Disney World \u2013 then you will be relieved to discover it has got no less stomach-unsettling.<\/p>\n

There is, however, no escaping the sound of air hissing from the film\u2019s tyres. Set a few years after the events of part one, with Grande\u2019s Glinda now a propaganda stooge for Jeff Goldblum<\/a>\u2019s Wizard, Wicked: For Good is certainly working hard to be about something. No Place Like Home, a new song, has Erivo warbling that \u201cOz is more than just a place. It\u2019s a promise, an idea.\u201d <\/p>\n

Charles Krauthammer, the late conservative pundit, once opined that the United States \u201cis the only country ever founded on an idea\u201d. So we can safely assume that the troubled Oz in For Good \u2013 with restrictions placed on immigration, and with anthropomorphised animals locked in cages \u2013 is an allegory for what the US is or what it might become. (It is worth recalling that the film was shot before the American presidential election of 2024.)<\/p>\n

All well and good. But there is little insight into how nations give in to totalitarianism. The argument that the Wizard\u2019s regime needs \u201csomebody to be wicked\u201d so Glinda \u201ccan be good\u201d is the closest we get to a worthwhile observation on the mechanics of populist misinformation.<\/p>\n

The new film spends more time toying with invented origins for the characters from the famous 1939 film of L Frank Baum\u2019s Oz stories. That exercise flags greatly through this less disciplined second act. In truth, Margaret Hamilton\u2019s unapologetically evil Wicked Witch was more fun than the increasingly sincere activist the character has become. She now seems as likely to enjoy distributing political tracts outside train stations as visiting cruelty on blameless Kansan vacationers. <\/p>\n

[\u00a0Wicked review: Yes, it\u2019s a nightmare in digital wax, but you\u2019ll leave the cinema in buoyant moodOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

On which subject, do we really need backstories for the monoadjectival state of Dorothy\u2019s companions? The heroine of The Wizard of Oz, seen only fleetingly from behind and in shadow, appears alongside thick scarecrow, unfeeling robot and spineless lion. Does it help us in any way to learn the Tin Man\u2019s motivations? No more than it would to learn why the iceberg acted so malevolently in Titanic.<\/p>\n

All of which unfair griping is by way of obliquely acknowledging that the musical numbers are not strong enough and the narrative not sufficiently robust to distract us from these peripheral concerns. The great Michelle Yeoh<\/a>\u2019s bafflingly flat turn as the evil Madame Morrible is even more exposed than it was a year ago. What on earth went on there?<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Director Jon M Chu on Wicked: \u2018I\u2019m excited for the world to finally know what Wicked really is\u2019Opens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

Yet, through sheer insistence, Erivo and Grande, who deserve the bump in status they\u2019ve received, almost pull it back together with a closing duet that makes a virtue of emotional incontinence.<\/p>\n

If the film-makers had released the project as one film, then Wicked might truly have proved a musical for the ages. Mind you, it would have made less money. So what was that idea the United States was founded on again?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Wicked: For Good \ue9d9 \ue9d9 \ue9d7 \ue9d7 \ue9d7 Director: Jon M Chu Cert: PG Starring: Ariana Grande, Cynthia…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":188268,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[75],"tags":[23349,69400,18,117,19,17,29397,105455,21007,7380],"class_list":{"0":"post-188267","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-ariana-grande","9":"tag-cynthia-erivo","10":"tag-eire","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-ie","13":"tag-ireland","14":"tag-jeff-goldblum","15":"tag-jon-m-chu","16":"tag-jonathan-bailey","17":"tag-michelle-yeoh"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/115574278924198512","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188267","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=188267"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188267\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/188268"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=188267"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=188267"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=188267"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}