Film Review - Wicked (2024)

Wicked is based off of the long running Broadway musical and is directed by John M. Chu who also directed In the Heights, the story concerns Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) who is born with green skin and frequently the subject of bullying by other kids and scorn by her governor father but one day she finds herself enrolled in Shiv University a prestigious school run by a headmistress (Michelle Yeoh) who recognises her potential as a sorceress and there she meets Glinda (Ariana Grande) and they become friends for the most part.

Wicked was a movie that I didn’t have huge hopes for mainly because I’m not a big musical guy, don’t get me wrong I love Grease, Little Shop of Horrors with Rick Moranis and Steven Spielberg’s remake of West Side Story but those are really about it and the previews for this film seemed to want to advertise it as a straightforward fantasy film rather than a musical.

But to my surprise and delight this movie is really good and thoroughly enjoyable and a very large part of that is down to 3 performances the first of those is Grande as Glinda who is simply wonderful here, she has this nice and sweet persona on the surface but sometimes her inner bitch can come to the surface in the right circumstances and Grande dances both sides of that character very well plus she does some great singing as well and her physical comedy as well is superb, doing hair tosses and pratfalls in a way that makes me hope she gets a good comedy role in the future.

Also Jeff Goldblum as the Wizard of Oz is inspired casting and if you know how that character ultimately plays out you can see why Goldblum was a great choice and he does the role very well.

But for me the heart and soul of this movie is Erivo as Elphaba, I’ve always enjoyed seeing her in movies since I first saw her in Bad Times at the El Royale in 2018 but since then I haven’t seen her in as many films but here she finally gets a good role to shine in and boy does she do so not just with her acting where you can see the seeds of what she will ultimately become grow more and more inside of her as the film goes on but also in her singing where she hits some incredible high notes.

In fact watching her and Grande reminded me a lot of when I first saw James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender as the young Professor Xavier and Magneto in X-Men First Class in terms of character becoming friends only for their differences in seeing the world and the people in it driving them apart to become enemies and Elphaba in particular reminded me a lot of Magneto from the X-Men movies.

However, there are a couple of issues I had with the film:

- The first of those is that at times the film feels it’s 160-minute length and that mainly came for me with the transitions from the dramatic moments to the musical numbers now don’t get me wrong the songs are very good but the way the film transitions into them felt a little jarring at times as I would get into a dramatic scene and then I would be pulled into a musical number and feel pulled out of the mood I was in during the dramatic moments.

Now great musicals like the ones I mentioned above handle that transition well but here not so much.

- And secondly this movie looked a little too clean visuals wise now that isn’t to say the film looks bad it does not there’s some great production design and costumes on show but it feels like it’s hidden behind the standard digital grey that keeps showing up more and more and more in movies nowadays and I can’t help but feel that if that wasn’t there then this movie would look far more colourful and magical than it does.

But perhaps this speaks to a wider problem within the industry itself and that is you only have a finite number of Visual Effects companies taking on more and more work be it movies and television and streaming shows/movies that they can only roster so much time onto one project before having to quickly move to the next one to get that ready for release and this has to change as 10-15 years ago this problem didn’t really exist and it has to stop because more and more projects are suffering as a result.

And so that was Wicked and it is a really enjoyable time at the movies despite some slight stumbles, 3 and a half out of 5.