🧂 Wicked (2024)

Splitting one Broadway act into an entire movie is either visionary or a runtime scam, and Wicked spends two hours and forty minutes trying to convince you it's the former.

Directed by Jon M. Chu. Distributed by Universal Pictures. 2024.

🧂 Salt: 6 / 10. A gorgeous, well-sung adaptation that still can't fully hide it's half a story stretched to feature length. and ⭐ Stars: 7 / 10. A genuine standout thanks to two performances doing the heavy lifting the runtime won't.

Somewhere over the rainbow, a girl turned green and got better material than Dorothy ever did.

Jon M. Chu's Wicked takes the first act of the long-running Broadway musical, itself spun out of Gregory Maguire's novel reimagining The Wizard of Oz from the villain's side, and gives it the full two-part blockbuster treatment. Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo), green-skinned since birth and treated accordingly, arrives at Shiz University and gets stuck rooming with Galinda (Ariana Grande), the school's reigning princess of ambition and hair. What starts as mutual loathing curdles into real friendship right as the wider Oz starts rotting from the inside: talking animals like Professor Dillamond are being quietly stripped of their voices, Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh) is grooming Elphaba's raw magic for someone else's purposes, and the Wizard himself (Jeff Goldblum) turns out to be running the whole operation on charisma and smoke machines. It's a prequel that knows exactly what it's building toward, and for a solid two hours, it earns the wait.

Cynthia Erivo makes Elphaba's isolation the load-bearing wall of the whole movie. Every flinch, every rehearsed politeness before a room turns on her, is calibrated so precisely that by the time she's airborne belting "Defying Gravity," the moment plays as release rather than spectacle. Erivo sings the hell out of the score, but the better trick is how much of Elphaba's arc she plays in silence, in the half-second before she decides, again, to keep being kind to a world that hasn't earned it.

Ariana Grande's Glinda is the film's funniest, most unexpectedly generous performance. Cast against the assumption that she's just there to be pretty and pink, Grande turns Galinda into a genuinely sharp physical comedian, all darting eyes and overcorrected poise, while quietly seeding the vanity and cowardice her character will need later. "Popular" is a showcase; the scenes where Glinda registers, and then buries, the cost of her own popularity are the performance.

The decision to split one act into an entire film is the movie's biggest gamble, and it doesn't fully pay off. Scenes that would be a verse and a scene change on stage get extended into full sequences of Oz-building that the story doesn't strictly need, and the midsection, once Elphaba and Glinda's friendship is established but before Morrible's plan kicks into gear, sags under the weight of a runtime built for two movies instead of one. The songs and performances are strong enough to mostly cover it, but "mostly" is doing work there.

The production design oversells Oz's wonder and undersells its color. The Emerald City and Shiz's campus are genuinely spectacular pieces of physical craft, but the film shoots almost all of it through such a heavy, desaturated grade that a story literally titled after a witch's signature hue keeps looking like it's afraid of its own palette. It's a strange choice for a movie this confident everywhere else.

Jeff Goldblum's Wizard does more with less screen time than the script probably deserves. He plays the character as pure showman first, con man a distant second, which makes the reveal of what he's actually doing to Oz's talking animals land as betrayal rather than twist. It's a small role stretched thin by the two-part structure, but Goldblum makes every minute of it count.

The verdict: a lavishly mounted, beautifully performed first half that trusts Erivo and Grande to carry real emotional weight through a fantasy plot about a corrupt regime silencing dissent, and mostly succeeds because those two never stop being specific even when the movie around them gets generic. It's a genuine achievement in adaptation, undercut by a structural decision that asks one act to fill a feature runtime it wasn't built for.

So why only six shakers? Because a film this well-sung shouldn't need padding to reach two hours and forty minutes, and a story about a girl defined by her color has no business being scared of its own. Those are real structural gripes, not a knock on how much genuine talent is on screen.

So did stretching one act into an entire movie actually pay off? Ask again after Part Two; the emotional highs are earning the encore, but the runtime's still running a tab.

Pass the salt. 🧂