It takes more than an hour into the second half of “ Wicked: For Good ” (so that’s the last quarter of the story as a whole) before director Jon M. Chu decides to wake up and direct the film. The preceding hour is a mess as the film fumbles at every opportunity to define the stakes and prepare us for (what we hope is) a grand finale. Unfortunately, Chu, needing to fit the requirements of his malformed cinematic epic, stuffs the film full of scenes that serve no purpose other than to obnoxiously pad the runtime.

“Wicked: For Good” finds Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) and Glinda (Ariana Grande) at odds — complete with an unconvincing love triangle — over whether to trust the great and powerful Oz, or to, well, I’m not sure what the alternative is, actually. The film doesn’t give them another opt

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