Oz Has Never Been Less Wonderful

Last year’s Wicked film was a big, brassy delight. Yes, the director Jon M. Chu’s adaptation of the long-running Broadway musical—itself drawn from a revisionist riff on L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz—had its flaws (why was every outdoor scene so scorchingly overlit?). Yet the smash-hit film’s charms were hard to resist, the kind of sumptuous family fare that Hollywood should be serving up more often. I did detect one glaring issue. Presented in the opening title card was a footnote: the words Part One. Uh-oh. Postponing all the necessary wrap-up to a sequel seemed like leaving a pile of dirty dishes in the sink for tomorrow.

Okay, maybe that second part, Wicked: For Good, isn’t quite that drastic a chore. But it does have a lot of narrative cleanup to do, in large part because of the t