“So is Wicked a good movie? As always with these cases, I’m withholding judgment until Part Two comes out next year. […] Until then, we only have half a movie, and anything can happen between now and then. (Just look at what happened with Dune: Part Two.)”

Even with all the hoopla surrounding the first half of Wicked last year, I was distinctly careful not to pass any firm judgment calls on half a movie. Because we’ve been here before. Ever since Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (which debatably did it first and did it best), we’ve seen a number of attempts to try and stretch one book into two or three movies. And it never seems to work as well as expected.

The Hobbit. It. Dune. With all the recent examples that come to mind, it’s the same pattern: Everyone loves the first movie and we’re all pumped for the second. Then the second film comes out a year later, the adaptation sinks under its own bloated self-importance, and there’s a general sense of disappointment. I’m hard-pressed to think of a single recent example that well and truly stuck the landing.

Guess what happened here.

Oh, I remember complaining about how the ending of Wicked was bloated. All these extraneous shots breaking up the rhythm and energy of what was otherwise a transcendent musical number. At the time, my friends and family made excuses for how it was all necessary to pack up the plot threads and tide us all over for another year until the sequel comes out.

So here we are with Wicked: For Good, opening with another 20 minutes of bloat, breaking another musical number to pieces, so we can all be brought up to speed. That, gentle readers, is what’s called “compounding the error”.

To be entirely fair, the second movie is a good 20 minutes shorter than the first movie, so the bloat isn’t nearly as bad this time. But even if there’s less of what made the first part so overstuffed and unwieldy, it’s here in the second part nonetheless. We’ve still got redundant flashback scenes. We’ve got film-original scenes. We’ve got songs and musical numbers and action set pieces that weren’t in the play. Yet their inclusion is more justifiable here.

The thing about “Wicked” — the movie and the stage musical both — is that the first half is loaded with the upbeat fantasy fun that everyone loves and remembers, but the second half is loaded with the stuff that actually matters. The second act has some barn-burning songs (“No Good Deed”, “For Good”, “As Long As You’re Mine”), but none of them are crowd-pleasing bops like we’ve got in the first act (“What Is This Feeling?” “Dancing Through Life”, “One Short Day”, etc.). Sure, “Defying Gravity” is a generational song of empowerment, but in terms of theme and messaging, it’s nowhere near as important as “Wonderful”.

“There are precious few at ease with moral ambiguities/ so we act as though they don’t exist.” That is such an underappreciated line, it might as well be the central thesis statement of the whole story.

Granted, the first act had a good helping of that political intrigue and social commentary, but it was only just enough to motivate the plot and balance out the aforementioned crowd-pleasing bops. The second act, by necessity, is all about the politics and social commentary. After “Defying Gravity”, there’s no way it couldn’t be. Elphaba is off waging her crusade against Oz, Dorothy is on her way over the rainbow, the Wicked Witch is getting melted, and there’s only so much that can be done to divert from the established path.

Unfortunately, both acts have here been separated into their own movies. Which means the first act and the second act can’t tonally balance each other out like they could onstage. Which means the second movie has to try harder to balance out all the doom and gloom.

Naturally, this means a ton of new callbacks to the more fun and energetic songs in Part One. It also means three new songs. Admittedly, the songs aren’t nearly as extraneous as I had worried, and they all fit nicely into their respective places in the plot. Unfortunately, they’re not catchy enough or upbeat enough to sufficiently bring up the energy.

Furthermore, a central recurring point of the film is how the antagonists use rosy propaganda and sugar-coated lies to keep the populace in line. As a direct result, the cheerier and more colorful moments are all undercut with a cynical sense of unease. Bowen Yang returns, but there’s even less room in the sequel for a film-original character, so he’s barely any use for comic relief. Hell, even the trick happy ending has a more downbeat presentation here — turns out the big reveal isn’t nearly as cathartic without a break for audience applause.

With all of that said, the “Girl in the Bubble” sequence was astounding. Those reflection shots looked effortless, the effect was freaking magical.

Really, the whole movie struggled to find a balance in tone. My favorite example comes right out the gate, when we see the slave labor that went into building the Yellow Brick Road. One of the all-time greatest icons of childhood fantasy, depicted as a product of exploitation. Gotta say, that’s a bold and powerful statement.

Then Elphaba swoops in, disrupting construction with comical ease. As one point, she literally rides her broom like a surfboard. What the hell am I supposed to do with that?

Then we’ve got the issue with Nessarose. A lot of ink has already been spilled, promising that Nessa’s arc would be revised in such a way as to make it less ableist and to accommodate Marissa Bode’s own physical needs. Without spoiling too much, the solution pretty much came down to leaning hard and heavy on Nessa’s heel-turn. Which makes sense — she is supposed to be the Wicked Witch of the East, after all.

What they do with Nessa works. Not as well as in the play, but it does work.

And then, of course there’s the matter of Dorothy (Bethany Weaver). She does appear all throughout the runtime, but she never gets a line and we never see her face. It’s a fair compromise. I don’t begrudge the audience or the filmmakers for checking in on the story that all this is supposedly a sidequel to, and the iconic heroine thereof. It’s more bloat, sure, but no more than necessary to give Dorothy her due.

And anyway, how could we not see that moment when the house crashes in? It has to be there and it has to be a huge effects scene, come on.

Honestly, I take bigger issue with making “Wonderful” a three-fer between Elphaba, Galinda, and the Wizard. Yes, I get the logic of putting Galinda in there to further buttress the all-important Elphaba/Galinda relationship. But this scene in the play is the only moment when it’s just Elphaba and the Wizard, and that relationship has its own importance. I might further add that the Wizard defending his own thoughts and actions doesn’t hold nearly as much weight when Galinda is there to back him up.

Sure, it still works. But not as well as it does in the play.

But then we come to the big problem. And in all fairness, this was a big problem in the original play as well. I refer to the original Wizard of Oz story that aggressively sets the pace of this story and when it has to end. The ending feels perfunctory, like everyone has to scramble and wrap things up because of what another character is doing somewhere in an unrelated story offscreen. I don’t know if there was any way around this, given the nature of the plot or premise, but that doesn’t take away from how quickly and easily everything is wrapped up. Especially given the complex morality and elaborate political machinations of all 4+ hours leading up to that point.

I have a difficult time gauging the Wicked adaptation, in large part because there’s so damn much of it. Once again, we’ve got a filmmaker learning the hard way that maintaining a consistent level of quality for nearly five hours is really fucking hard. I might further add that absence doesn’t always make the heart grow fonder, and the wait between entries can take the shine off a series entirely.

I know it isn’t fair comparing this film to the Cats disaster of 2019 — this two-part film is nowhere near as bad — but Wicked is nonetheless proof positive of certain vital lessons that Hollywood never learned from that failure. For one, sometimes a Broadway musical becomes massively popular precisely because it works so well as a Broadway musical, and won’t work nearly as well in another medium. Moreover, sometimes less is better. Not every Broadway adaptation needs to be hugely epic in scope, and it doesn’t have to be made for chasing Oscars.

These filmmakers were under the clear impression that they had to make this as huge and epic as they possibly could. So they split each act into its own separate movie, allowing more room to expand the world and the story. Sure, I get how that might make sense on paper. In practice, both films can’t counterbalance each other in tone like the play could, and now we’re stuck with all this extra material that nobody wanted or asked for.

It really didn’t have to be this hard, people. To repeat my point from my review of the first movie, everybody knows the story of Wizard of Oz. Everyone in the target audience knows the musical. The original musical was a world-conquering hit from Day One (Remember, folks, I was there — this was an immediate smash hit on Broadway. This was “Hamilton” levels of success over ten years before “Hamilton”.), and there was never any reason to believe this film would’ve been any less successful at bringing in audiences. We didn’t need all this exposition, all these extraneous scenes, all these flashbacks and original songs just to cater to someone who never needed it in the first place.

The second movie proves that this should’ve been a one-movie adaptation all along. I eagerly await the fan edits to prove how well both of these films could’ve been compressed into one. In the meantime, we’ve got a two-film adaptation that follows the exact same pattern as The Hobbit, It, and Dune before it: A promising start and a finish that evens out to mediocrity. Though this one does come closer to greatness than those other ones, I’ll grant.