WICKED: For Good by Jon M. Chu

Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo as Glinda and Elphaba in Wicked: For Good. GILES KEYTE/UNIVERSAL PICTURES.

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Jon M. Chu’s Wicked: For Good arrives with the shimmering aura of a foregone phenomenon — the kind of film whose cultural footprint was stamped long before the projector whirred to life — yet it also carries the anxious burden of concluding a story that has lived in people’s imaginations for two decades. Sequels seldom get the luxury of mystery; For Good enters a world already mapped, sung, and litigated by fans, detractors, and Broadway diehards. But what’s surprising, and at times even disarming, is how much the film leans into the vulnerability of expectation, approaching its closing chapter not with bombast but with something gentler and riskier: intimacy.

Where the first film charted the enchanted—and occasionally exhausting—world-building of Shiz University and the giddy, vertiginous ascent toward “Defying Gravity,” its successor begins in the bruised aftermath of that ascent. Chu understands something fundamental about the second half of Wicked: the fairytale’s shine has worn off, the characters are tired, and the choices they make now must carry the weight of consequence. He and the screenwriters approach this with the patience of dramatists rather than the reflexes of spectacle-builders. The result is a film that moves like a confession—lush, melodic, and at times heavy with what cannot be undone.

Cynthia Erivo’s Elphaba is no longer the bright, brilliant misfit testing the boundaries of Oz’s power structures; she is a woman in exile, hunted and mythologized simultaneously, forced to inhabit the monstrous reflection projected onto her. Erivo sings as though the notes were shards of conviction, brittle and sharp, each one insisting on the truth of Elphaba’s pain. If the first film let her brilliance unfurl, this one demands she burn. Her “No Good Deed” is not just the film’s emotional fulcrum; it is its thesis—an aria of moral exhaustion performed with the kind of volcanic restraint only Erivo seems capable of sustaining.

But the revelation, the lightning strike that jolts the film into something richer than a dutiful sequel, is Ariana Grande’s Glinda. Grande, long underestimated because of her gleaming pop veneer, reveals an actor whose instrument is far more complex than her public persona suggests. Her voice, crystalline and unhurried, carries the ache of someone discovering the cost of benevolence too late. Chu, wisely, gives her space to explore those fissures. The new song “The Girl in the Bubble” is her signature transformation moment: Glinda confronting her privilege not as ornamentation but as a prison. Grande plays it not as a diva in crisis but as a young woman finally hearing her own thoughts. It’s the rare musical number that deepens a character rather than simply showcasing a performer.

Indeed, the film’s most startling evolution is its devotion to the friendship between Elphaba and Glinda. Too often in adaptations, their bond is treated as an elaborate narrative device — the necessary tether between two contrasting archetypes. But here, aided by added scenes and a more generous script, we witness the full architecture of their connection: admiration curdling into resentment, resentment maturing into understanding, understanding dissolving into something like love. Their duets crackle with the bittersweet electricity of relationships that matter too much to survive unchanged.

Jon M. Chu proves unexpectedly adept at this quieter emotional landscape. He steps back from the sweeping, kinetic filmmaking that animated the first film — fewer grandiose dance set pieces, fewer self-conscious nods to Golden Age musicals — and instead embraces a style that almost feels classical. The musical numbers unfold like whispered confidences, their choreography understated, their camera movements attentive rather than imposing. It is a choice that may confound those who prefer their movie musicals big enough to blot out the sun, but it also allows the narrative’s rawer themes to resonate without distraction.

And those themes are darker this time, more forthright in their politics. Oz is no longer the whimsical, lime-lit fantasia of the first film; it is a society weaponized by propaganda, trembling under authoritarian rule. The Wizard’s genial fraudulence has calcified into something uglier, and Jeff Goldblum plays him with a manic, glittering menace — a “wise old carnie” whose charm is as corrosive as it is seductive. The film’s depiction of institutional cruelty is not subtle; its imagery of animals rounded up by uniformed soldiers evokes historical traumas the story doesn’t pretend to hide. But the bluntness gives the narrative urgency. The film doesn’t simply reference tyranny; it indicts the comfort that allows it to take root.

Yet in the midst of these sweeping allegories, For Good never abandons its fairy-tale heart. The origin stories for the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion arrive as imaginative riffs rather than plot obligations, and though not all of them land with equal force, they enrich the tapestry of Oz in ways that feel more organic than opportunistic. Jonathan Bailey’s Fiyero, too, is granted a more nuanced arc, his charm tempered by moral compromise. His fate, tragic in its inevitability, is presented not as a punishment but as a commentary on what bravery demands when truth becomes inconvenient.

Still, for all its virtues — the performances, the thematic clarity, the moments of piercing beauty — the film falters where it most needed strength: in its ending. Without spoiling the particulars for the few who walk into this film unfamiliar with the broad contours of Oz’s mythology, it’s enough to say that the final act strains under the weight of its own expectations. What should feel cathartic instead feels hurried; what should devastate ends up merely saddening. The emotional crescendo the film so rigorously constructs does not fully resolve. Instead, it fades, a sigh where a final breath was needed. One can sense the filmmakers steering carefully around the canon’s fixed points, cautious not to stray too far from established lore — but that caution costs the film its last note of daring.

And yet, even with its imperfect conclusion, Wicked: For Good lingers with a potency most blockbusters never approach. It is a film that sings of the peril and possibility of change, of friendships that transform us and the narratives that distort us. It is messy, earnest, defiantly emotional — the rare sequel that refuses to exist merely to complete a set. Its flaws make it human; its ambition makes it worthy. Viewers may leave the theater wrestling with that disappointing, sorrow-tinged ending, but they will also leave humming — haunted, perhaps, by the questions the film dares to ask: Who gets to tell your story? Who gets to believe it? And what does it cost to be good in a world that prefers its witches wicked?

LENA GHIO   

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