“Baddies: For Good” is very, very bad

As part of an anti-Wicked Witch of the West smear campaign, Morrible attempts to entrap the loyalties of Elphaba’s closest former colleagues: Glinda, the smiling but conflicted mascot of the ostocracy, and the dashing Prince Fierro (Jonathan Bailey), now captain of the Wizard’s Guard. But Fiyero’s heart belongs to Elphaba, and even when he and Glinda are pressured into a very public engagement, the air is full of political and emotional subterfuge. This isn’t the only romantic complication afoot. To my taste, a lot of “Wicked: For Good” reads like “Oz the World Turns” dramas, though I credit most daytime soap operas with superior production values. Why is everything in this movie, despite its gilded, emerald-encrusted design, either so dim or so bright—backlighting so blinding that it looks like Oz is under perpetual thermonuclear attack, or so obscure you can barely tell the difference between a monkey and a Munchkin?

Munchkinland happens to be now ruled by Elphaba’s younger sister, Nessarose (Marissa Bode), who does not share her brother’s strict integrity. Nessarose uses a wheelchair, and one of the most miserable aspects of “Wicked: For Good” is the conflation of physical disability with soul-crushing bitterness. Nessaroz was given nothing further to express; She is clingy, the embodiment of jealousy. She resents Elphaba for her rebelliousness, just as she resents Boq (Ethan Slater), a Munchkin she loves, for abandoning her to pursue Glinda. Boq’s nickname is Woodsman, by the way, and you don’t need to be an Ozphile fan to feel the dark direction this is all headed. Just follow the yellow brick road.

And that, as far as I can tell, is the raison d’être of “Villain: For Good”: so that the events of Baum’s novel and the 1939 film, forever cemented in the public imagination, can be put into place. But should they be maneuvered in such a clumsy manner, in light of this blatant absence of minds and hearts? Over time, we’ll learn about Dorothy Gale—with some flashes of gingham—and the force-fed origin stories of her traveling companions, which range from the senselessly contrived to the gratuitously shocking. (Even if your kids can stomach the Tin Man’s arrival, Scarecrow’s cornfield crucifixion may be the last straw.) On stage, all this narrative reworking has a behind-the-scenes cleverness, as if the story were being slyly fleshed out in the margins. On screen, and on full display, it feels close to an abomination – a parody of fairy-tale logic and popular cultural memory. By the time Dorothy and her friends walk to Elphaba’s lair, it seems there is something more harmful going on than just mediocrity at work. It’s as if the picture was so afraid of its famous predecessor that it could only respond with an intense desire to destroy the classic that could never be.

Maguire’s novel itself is written in a corrective spirit. He aimed to bring morally ambiguous modernity and explicit adult sexuality to bear on Baum’s clear delineations of good and evil. But on the physical front, at least, the music consists of softer stuff. The less said the better about Elphaba and Fiyero’s volatile seduction number (“Somehow I’ve fallen / Under your spell / And somehow I feel / It’s over because I’ve fallen”), or about what’s said, forlornly, in pillow talk: “You’re beautiful,” Fiyero exclaims, and when Elphaba accuses him of lying, he replies: “It’s not a lie. He looks at things another way.” How’s that for flattery?

Some legitimate emotion erupts when Elphaba and Glinda are reunited due to tragedy, allowing their long-standing rivalry to end in a stick-versus-broomstick battle. Who is the witch who emerges victorious, not only from that battle but from the whole of this crowded, confusing, and hopelessly distorted movie? I would say the movie is lucky to have them together. In the first part, Erivo makes public decency seem dramatic; Here, it’s satisfying to see Elphaba in aggressive defiance of the wizard regime. Grande has also come into her own. After her subtle comedic gag in “Part One,” she has the more difficult task of conveying Glinda’s first real experience of rejection and disappointment. “It’s time to burst her bubble,” she sings about herself in a quivering ballad — one of two new, memorable songs Schwartz wrote for the film. Perhaps this rare moment of self-awareness comes at the least opportune time: Glinda in her luxurious tower room, watching from above the Emerald City descend into chaos.

It’s tone deaf but honest. “Bad Guys: For Good” is full of references to the foolish masses of Oz – their gullibility, corruption, and stupidity. Elphaba uses this as a justification for why she must sacrifice herself in the end and becomes a public symbol of evil incarnate: as she says to Glinda, “They need someone to be evil, so you can be good.” The magician adopts his own version of this idea, confident that the audience can be appeased through the illusion of a common enemy. Although this sarcasm is misplaced, it seems completely unearned. The “wicked” films never convince us – in the way that The Wizard of Oz or Walter Murch’s dark thriller “Return to Oz” (1985) convinced us – of the fictional reality of Oz as a real place. Cho and his screenwriters show no curiosity about the history, culture, and politics of the kingdom, or even about the potential dangers of people surrendering to wizard fascism. The citizens of Oz are treated as nothing more than an undifferentiated crowd of extras, an ignorant and ultimately disposable monolith. The film’s fawning over the audience, and our supposedly superior conscience, is an expression of the same contempt. ♦