Film reviews: Wicked: For Good | The Thing With Feathers | Sisu: Road to Revenge
Jon M Chu’s attempt to mine yet more backstory from the rich lore of The Wizard of Oz is utterly devoid of magic, writes Alistair Harkness
Wicked: For Good (PG) ★★
The Thing with Feathers (15) ★★
Sisu: Road to Revenge (15) ★★
Concluding last year’s serviceable origins story of the Wizard of Oz’s hitherto deliciously depraved villain, Wicked: For Good continues the mission to reverse-engineer unnecessary backstory from its original source material, to nullifying effect. Getting thoroughly lost in the minutiae of the story, returning director Jon M Chu reveals the whole endeavour to be a stretched-thin, creatively confused epic that’s part feeble-minded fable about fascism, part corporate brand expansion of the hit Broadway musical, the limitations of which are much more obvious now that the film has to incorporate the plot of its superior inspiration into the mix.
With the green-skinned Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) fully ostracised as the Wicked Witch of the West, this instalment kicks off with her futile efforts to expose the demagoguery of the Wizard of Oz (Jeff Goldblum), whose vainglorious campaign to make Oz great again with the unnecessary construction of yellow brick roads and the mass incarceration of talking animals is being lapped up by a public who don’t care that every word out of his mouth is a lie (“these people will believe anything” trills one character early on).
Opting to go into hiding instead, she’s coaxed out by a cabal of Oz sycophants, among them her bubble-dwelling frenemy Glinda (Ariana Grande), who also knows the way to get to Elphaba is through her disabled sister, Nessarose (Marissa Bode), whom we see being furnished with a pair of magic slippers that apparently give her the power to float through the air, but not dodge falling houses.
The latter event is the most egregious example of the film’s use of The Wizard of Oz. The death of Nessarose (no one ever refers to her as the Wicked Witch of the East) is here re-imagined as a political assassination in which Dorothy Gale – whose face we never see – is a patsy, used by Oz, Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh) and Glinda to capture Elphaba, who doesn’t, in truth, seem all that bothered about the death of her sister, just the loss of the slippers.
There are other detrimental additions, such as the Munchkin origins of the Tin Man (huh?) and the revelation that the Cowardly Lion (Colman Domingo) has a grudge against Elphaba for setting him free from a zoo (what?). There’s also a baffling origins story for the Scarecrow that’s too much of a spoiler to get into and, in fact, the character is kept mostly off screen anyway, appearing only at the end as part of a nonsensical twist designed to re-emphasise a beauty-is-in-the-eye-of-the-beholder message that the film is half-heartedly peddling.
But even here the film doesn’t have the courage of its progressive convictions, relegating its queer-coded characters to the margins and giving Elphaba a hunky hetero love interest (Jonathan Bailey’s Fiyero) that further undermines the supposed tragedy of her own misunderstood nature.
Wicked: For Good may thoroughly deconstruct the rich lore of The Wizard of Oz, but like the characters left behind at the end, what it builds in its place is devoid of magic.
Maybe fans of Max Porter’s best-selling source novella of almost the same name will get more out The Thing With Feathers than those coming to it cold. As a film about grief it’s a cringey mix of elevated horror movie clichés and the kind of calculated heart-tugging you might find in a John Lewis Christmas ad.
Benedict Cumberbatch takes the lead as the recently widowed father of two young boys whose wife’s sudden death has left him an emotional wreck, forced to reckon with the fact he’s not just a sad dad, but a bad dad (a flashback reveals that the first time he took his sons out on his own they we already three and four, which should really have been grounds for divorce, but not in the world of this film apparently).
He’s also a graphic novelist and from his grief-fuelled self-absorption he conjures up a giant crow (voiced by David Thewlis) that starts to haunt his reality and goad him and his boys into making the psychological breakthroughs that their grief counsellor is also on hand to explain in case we can’t work out what’s going from all the overwrought visuals and shouty acting.
A sequel to the 2023 Finnish action movie whose untranslatable title – so the preamble goes – is a form of courage that manifests itself when all hope is lost, Sisu: Road to Revenge repeats the relentless chase structure of the first film, but this time focuses on the efforts of its grizzled protagonist (once again played by Jorma Tommila) to literally rebuild his home in his native Finland after returning from World War Two to Soviet-occupied Karelia only to discover the Red Army have slaughtered his family. The ensuing action is outlandishly grizzly, but the plot and character motivation is so rote it’s hard to invest in his titular quest for vengeance.
All films in cinemas from 21 November
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