Review: Jon M. Chu's Wicked: For Good For Good feels palpably afraid to embrace its anti-fascist roots

The (unnecessary) part two of Wicked is here, officially titled Wicked: For Good, implying an end to my long personal nightmare of watching this interminable musical. As in part one, For Good is directed by Jon M. Chu, written by Winnie Holzman and Dana Fox, and is adapted from the stage musical Wicked by Stephen Schwartz and Winnie Holzman, which is in turn based on Gregory Maguire’s novel of the same name, which is an unofficial prequel to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum. The creative chain of custody is as convoluted as For Good’s narrative sensibility, which is basically “oops all fascism”.

Picking up five years after the events of the first film—a non-indicated time jump—Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) is living on the lam while her former school frenemy, Galinda, now called Glinda (Ariana Grande) has ascended to be Oz’s face of fascism. The Wizard (Jeff Goldblum) and Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh, never quite singing) have succeeded in scapegoating Elphaba as the “wicked witch” and banishing animals from public life. They’re also cracking down on Munchkins, something Elphaba’s sister, Nessarose (Marissa Bode), is happy to help along if it means keeping the Munchkin Boq (Ethan Slater) by her side.

Oz is a deeply unpleasant place full of torch-and-pitchfork yokels, a mob so insanely hive-like and simple they make the villagers from Beauty and the Beast look like Mensa candidates. Fiyero was right, “brainless is painless” and the Ozians signed up for their lobotomies en masse. Speaking of Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey), he is now captain of the guard, hunting Elphaba, but mostly so he can tacitly help her avoid arrest. With pressure from Madame Morrible to uplift the people, Glinda in turn pressures Fiyero into marrying her, which he half-heartedly agrees to do. (If a Jonathan Bailey character promises to marry you, girl, no he won’t.) I feel like they could have just given the Ozians some balloons to play with, these are very simple people who ask no questions, a wedding isn’t really necessary. Just jingle your car keys at them.

Glinda, girlbossing her way into fascism, also isn’t asking questions because she is getting everything she ever wanted from the Wizard’s authoritarian state. On the one hand, casting Ariana Grande to play a tiny fairy fascist is clever because it really drives home how authoritarian control often utilizes harmless façades to advance agendas; on the other hand, at one point Grande rhymes “corst/lost/cross” because she can’t enunciate “cost”, so it’s a mixed bag overall.

The best idea preserved in For Good is that everything Elphaba tries to expose Oz to the truth of about the Wizard’s lies blows up in her face. She accidentally and/or unintentionally creates the Cowardly Lion (Colman Domingo, wasted)—who is only mad at Elphaba, not Fiyero, for his cowardly state, though both are responsible, a spot of misogyny the film does not touch—the Tin Man, and the Scarecrow, all acts of good intention gone wrong. Cynthia Erivo is terrific, and it is moving to watch Elphaba keep trying so hard to do good only to be further vilified and shamed.

It's viscerally frustrating, and Elphaba’s increasing desperation is the strongest element of the film. By the time Elphaba declares her commitment to wickedness it actually feels like an earned heel turn. One can only hope Elphaba will pack her bags and leave the Ozians to their fates, but she cannot help but try to help. As a musical, Wicked is supposed to be about friendship, but the film adaptation is strongest when playing into the tragedy of Elphaba’s misunderstood intentions.

As For Good is a musical, I should say something about the music. There is music: none of it is memorable. Also, there is a shocking lack of dance numbers this time around. The least you could do is give me a fun Fiyero dance number, but no. And there is a huge, missed opportunity, as Fiyero and Elphaba confess their love and spend a night together. It’s a perfect place to drop a saucy and/or romantic dance number, but instead they just…walk around.

For a movie that is obviously expensive—though still strangely ugly, why desaturate the colors in a film related to the film famous for bringing Technicolor to the big screen? Mysteries of the universe, I suppose—For Good feels particularly half-baked. It turns out, the first film benefits from all that table-setting, introducing characters and dynamics. Now, we know the characters and the dynamics are established, but nothing develops to carry the narrative load in part two. There’s an underpinning of rebellion against authoritarianism, but For Good’s biggest idea is “telling the truth is too hard, so just don’t do it”.

Literally when she has the chance to set the record straight, Glinda doubles down on the lie that the Wizard and Morrible spun. The people of Oz are just too stupid to process propaganda, I guess. What an uplifting musical tale this is! The world is SO FULL of idiots you can never tell the truth because once they believe a lie they’ll never change their minds! I know people like this do exist, we live with it every day in the real world, but there are also other types of people.

Not in Oz, though. That place is solid Kool-Aid drinkers, wall to wall. It’s like the ending of It’s A Wonderful Life, in which everyone but the main guy is still dumb, and no lessons were learned. The mistakes of the past will definitely be repeated because no one ever figured out how a mortgage works except for one guy. In this case, Glinda is the one guy but she’s no George Bailey. If something threatens her own sense of self-importance, she’ll gladly tell the world you’re the devil, a character beat she fully grows into by the end of the film.

The first film mostly works as a school adventure about friendship, sisterhood, and the descent into fascism, but For Good feels palpably afraid to embrace its anti-fascist roots (Maguire’s book is blatantly anti-fascist). I would love to see the Andor version of Wicked: For Good, but that would require a willingness to address the hard stuff in the story, and For Good is not about the hard stuff. It’s fine if the film wants to be fluff, except there is an awful lot of non-fluff setup. It makes for a tonal mishmash that never resolves, a musical anti-fascist allegory grafted onto a “friendship is magic” frame, with completely unmemorable music, except for the time Ariana Grande sings “corst”. Wicked: For Good is a f-cking weird movie.

Wicked: For Good will play exclusively in theaters from November 21, 2025.