Ben Shapiro Reviews "Wicked: For Good"

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Speaker 7 Okay, folks, so I did it. I saw Wicked part two for good.
And here is my full review. This review is sponsored by our friends at ExpressVPN.

Speaker 7 All righty, so as you know, I'm a musical theater junkie.

Speaker 7 And when it comes to Wicked, I want to talk about the problems with Wicked the Musical before I get to the actual movie, because I don't think it's quite fair to evaluate Wicked the Movie without understanding the musical upon which it is based, because obviously it's an adaptation.

Speaker 7 So Wicked the Musical has a problem. The first act to Wicked the Musical is excellent.
Like, very, very good. It has a bunch of hit songs ranging from popular to defiant gravity.

Speaker 7 Now, go look at my first review for all of that. The problem with Wicked the Musical is that the second act is really weak.
Now, this is not unique to Wicked the Musical.

Speaker 7 And again, this this is not a rip on Steven Schwartz or on the librettist for the play. It is a rip on the musical in the sense that a lot of Act IIs in famous musicals are just not as good as Act I.

Speaker 7 And there's a reason for that. Typically, when you are writing a screenplay or if you're writing just a spoken play, there are three acts.
There's Act 1, Act 2, Act 3.

Speaker 7 And usually the action is somewhat evenly divided between Act 1, Act 2, and Act 3. Musicals are written in two acts.
Typically, there's an intermission between Act 1 and Act 2.

Speaker 7 Very often, what tends to happen for librettists, the people who are writing the so-called book, the script for the thing, typically what tends to happen is that the librettist will stack what would in a normal play be Act one and Act II.

Speaker 7 They'll stack all of that in Act 1. So a lot of the action happens in Act 1.
And then Act 2 would be equivalent to the Act 3 in the play.

Speaker 7 And so one-third of the action takes place in like half of the musical. And so what you end up with is a bunch of filler.

Speaker 7 So even musicals that I absolutely adore are very often have a bunch of filler in them that is necessary to sort of take up time.

Speaker 7 So if you take sort of the original Broadway classic musical, Oklahoma, the first half of the musical works beautifully.

Speaker 7 The second half of the musical, they need some filler, and so they end up having a dream sequence with the ballet.

Speaker 7 And this was kind of the old school way of solving for the fact that a second act is not fully plotted. That happens in Wicked.

Speaker 7 So a lot of the action, a lot of the best songs are in Act 1, which would have been the first movie. Act two, which is the second movie, really is thin on plot.

Speaker 7 And there are a lot of plot holes in Wicked, the second act. The end of the first movie is that Galinda and Alphaba realize that the wizard is bad and that he's doing bad things.

Speaker 7 And Alphaba takes off, right? She's going to defy gravity. She's going to lead a revolution.
She asks Galinda to come with her.

Speaker 7 Galinda says, no, I don't have the strength of character to just join you in the revolution. I'm going to stay here.
And you take off. Fine.

Speaker 7 So now what you expect to happen in Act Two is that Elphaba does, in fact, lead a revolution. Instead, Elphaba kind of flies around and does sporadic things that are annoying.

Speaker 7 to the regime without actually leading a revolution.

Speaker 7 And Galinda sticks around knowing how evil the wizard is, presumably because she's getting the benefit of the bargain, because Fiero, who ends up being the scarecrow, presumably because she thinks she's in love with Fiero, she's getting the benefit of the bargain.

Speaker 7 Fiero ends up leaving her, going to Alphaba, and then she kind of turns on Elphaba briefly. This ends unintentionally with the death of Alphaba's sister, who is the wicked witch of the east.

Speaker 7 The wicked witch of the east, bro! Act two starts, and Elphaba is off kind of raising hell. And Galinda, this is the beginning of the movie.

Speaker 7 Galinda is singing to everybody about how things are wonderful, and she's now the face of the regime.

Speaker 7 Well, fairly early on in Act II, there's another scene where she gets together with Alphaba and brings her to the wizard and they have another scene where it looks like they might get back together and everything's going to be okay.

Speaker 7 That's super weird. Nothing's changed.
Why precisely is it that Elphaba would think that she could get away with working with the wizard? She knows he's bad already.

Speaker 7 Also, Alphaba is by far the most powerful person in the entire universe of Oz here. So if she wants to take out the wizard in any way, she wants to put him on a hot air balloon and float him away.

Speaker 7 He doesn't have any power. She can do whatever she wants to get rid of.
She doesn't do any of that. Instead, the conflict just kind of simmers and broils.

Speaker 7 And the only real plot changes that happen in Act Two are the death of the Wicked Witch of the East, sort of unintentionally at Galinda's hands, but really at the hands of the wizard and of his hench woman, Madame Morable.

Speaker 7 And then Fiero going to Alphaba, and then you get to the end. Because there's not a lot of plot in Act II, and the plot is kind of relentlessly dark, and the motivations are somewhat confusing.

Speaker 7 That's all a problem with the original musical. That really has nothing to do with the movie per se.
And so I don't want to judge the movie as an independent vehicle because it's not.

Speaker 7 It's working off the source material. This means that the biggest criticism of Wicked for Good is that Wicked for Good and Wicked, the original, should have been one movie.

Speaker 7 You could have solved all of these problems and in fact fixed a lot of the plot holes by making this all one movie.

Speaker 7 The first movie is about 40 minutes too long and the second movie is about an hour too long, maybe 40 minutes too long. There's a bunch of filler in the second movie in Wicked for Good.

Speaker 7 There's a flashback scene of Galinda when she's a kid that you totally don't need, for example. There are two additional songs.

Speaker 7 Knowing that the second act is weak, Steven Schwartz wrote two more additional songs just for the movie.

Speaker 7 One of them is a song that Elphaba sings to the animals called There's No Place Like Home, which of course is a riff on the original Wizard of Oz. And then the second song is a solo number by Glinda.

Speaker 7 I believe it's titled The Girl in the Bubble because she, of course, is in the bubble. Neither of these songs is particularly memorable.

Speaker 7 And this is the biggest problem with Wicked for Good is that basically there is one good number in Wicked for Good and it's the last number, for good, which is a great number.

Speaker 7 That's a legitimately great musical theater number, but there are a bunch of other numbers that just don't really go anywhere.

Speaker 7 And again, that's a critique of the original musical and speaks to the fact that some of the best movie adaptations of musicals are condensations of the material.

Speaker 7 So, West Hide Story is a good example of a show that had a weak second act and that had a ballet in the middle of it. They just removed the ballet.
It doesn't exist.

Speaker 7 in the actual movie musical, and they shifted Officer Krupke from what used to be later in the musical to much earlier in the musical.

Speaker 7 You can make changes when you make a movie adaptation that don't have to be on the stage. And that's the single problem, I would say, with the wicked movies is that they should have done this.

Speaker 7 They should have made the entire musical two and a half hours, two hours 45. They should have cut out a lot of the fat.

Speaker 7 They should have restructured the second act somewhat to make more kind of plot sense. And that would have been, so it's really a missed opportunity in that way, as opposed to...

Speaker 7 a problem with the movies per se. It's not a critique of the movies as they are, more it's a critique of what they could have been if they had not tried to turn it into two separate longer movies.

Speaker 7 Alrighty folks, we'll get to more on my review of Wicked for Good in a moment. First, you know that creepy feeling you get sometimes like you're being watched while browsing online?

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Speaker 7 Okay, now, as to the actual content of the movie, putting aside the plot problems. Again, musically,

Speaker 7 the numbers are not nearly as good as the numbers in the first part of Wicked. This is not to denigrate the talents of the people who are working here.

Speaker 7 The guy who plays Fiero, Jonathan Bailey, is talented. He's good on screen.
He just doesn't have a whole hell of a lot to do. He has one number with Cynthia Arrivo.
That is an okay number.

Speaker 7 It's not like a great ballad. It's kind of all right.
Otherwise, he doesn't have much to do.

Speaker 7 Cynthia Rivo, who is the most talented member of the cast, as I discussed in the first Wicked, I thought she was terrific. She really doesn't have a lot to do in the second act of Wicked.

Speaker 7 One of the things that happens in the show is that the focus really shifts fairly heavily from Elphaba and her kind of travails in the first act to Galinda and her travails in the second act.

Speaker 7 So Ariana Grande does turn in a very good performance here. So I wasn't a huge fan of her in the first part of Wicked.
I think she's really good, actually, in Wicked for Good.

Speaker 7 I think that her actual dramatic performance is the strongest part of what she does. She's never going to have Cynthia Rivo's voice.
She's not. Cynthia Rivo has pipes.

Speaker 7 Ariana Grande can hit notes, but she doesn't have the power behind the note that Cynthia Rivo has. She just, her voice isn't as full.

Speaker 7 And so when they sing for good at the end, Cynthia Rivo can belt in a way that Aria Grande just cannot. Again, it's not a rip on her voice.
It is what it is.

Speaker 7 As an actress, she does a very good job at this part. As an actress, she has a lot to do, a lot more to do than Cynthia Rivo does.
And so Cynthia Rivo is kind of playing bitter the entire second act.

Speaker 7 From that perspective, I think that Ariana Grande Grande owns the movie, and she's probably going to receive a supporting actor nomination.

Speaker 7 Probably because they'll try to nominate both, I would imagine, as supporting actresses, even though both are actually the lead actresses.

Speaker 7 Or they'll try to say that Cynthia Rivo is the lead and Aria Grande is supporting. And she probably deserves a supporting actress nomination if that's the category that she falls into.

Speaker 7 It's a very good performance by Ariana Grande. The supporting roles, I think, are lackluster, aside from Jonathan Bailey, who, again, does a good job with minimal material.

Speaker 7 I'd say Jeff Goldblum is meh. Michelle Yeo, she's just miscast.
She was miscast in the first movie. She's miscast here.
She can't really sing particularly well.

Speaker 7 The special effects are kind of overwhelming in this movie in a way they weren't in the first movie.

Speaker 7 In the first movie, there's a lot more, I would say, interesting choreography, again, because the numbers are themselves more interesting.

Speaker 7 One thing visually that the director does that I like a lot is the take on Bach.

Speaker 7 So Bach, for those who have not seen the musical or the movie yet, and again, spoiler alert, I'm, you know, just speaking frankly about everything that's in here. Bach becomes the Tin Man, right?

Speaker 7 He is one of the munchkins.

Speaker 7 Nessa, who becomes a wicked witch of the east and is increasingly sort of perverted by her love for Bach, who doesn't love her back, she basically tries to keep him there and then she ends up trying to steal his heart and stealing his heart.

Speaker 7 That forces Elphaba to turn him into the Tin Man so he can survive. The graphic depiction of the Tin Man is really effective.

Speaker 7 And you can see why Bach becomes almost a villainous character going after the Wicked Witch of the West because he feels that she's the one who turned him into the Tin Man.

Speaker 7 And that is visually quite effective, actually. The special effects around the scarecrow are not nearly as effective.

Speaker 7 The visual effects of Alphaba flying, there are a couple of moments where it sort of takes you out of the story.

Speaker 7 Very early on, there's a point where she's almost surfing on her broom and it's totally unnecessary. She should just jump on the broom and be done with it.

Speaker 7 Overall, again, I think performances are fine. I think that the Ariana Grande performance is very good.
I think the Alphaba Cynthia Rivo performance is good.

Speaker 7 It's not nearly as showy as sort of her first performance in the first part of Wiccan. I do have a quibble with the final number.
Again, I think For Good is a tremendous number.

Speaker 7 It's a really, really good musical theater number. At the very end, and this is sort of my problem with John Chu as a director, he feels the necessity to hammer his points home with a brick.

Speaker 7 The very last number, Alphaba is singing with Galinda, and they're singing about how they made each other better because of their friendship.

Speaker 7 And then there is the sort of back into the back into the future, right? Because the whole musical is a flashback. Back into the future, where Galinda is explaining everything to the Munchkins.

Speaker 7 She doesn't tell them the full truth, but she's singing and she's talking about how they were friends. And there's a bit of a reprise of For Good.

Speaker 7 And at the very end, there's a split screen screen with Galinda and Alphaba and they're in two different places but they're thinking about each other and that's all very nice and then Galinda basically has Alphaba's powers transferred to her so she can actually be magic which is the thing that she's wanted all along that's all very nice and then at the very very very end like the last image of the film John Chu decided to put a cutaway like I just got a kind of insert shot of Alphaba and Galinda in better days when they were just kind of like out for a picnic.

Speaker 7 It's totally just bang you over the head. It's unnecessary.
You don't need that at all. And it took me out of the the picture at the very end, which was kind of annoying.

Speaker 7 But you know, overall, I think the movie is fine, like on a scale of one to ten.

Speaker 7 If I thought that the first movie was like an eight out of ten or a nine out of ten, I think the second movie is more like a seven out of ten.

Speaker 7 Some of that is just due to the underlying material, which is weaker than Wicked Part 1, the original Wicked. For good, it's just Act Two.
It's weaker.

Speaker 7 The biggest critique is all should have been one movie.

Speaker 7 And then there's the sort of politics of the underlying material, again, which the politics of the underlying material is that people need to be lied to by their leaders, which is a very weird takeaway.

Speaker 7 The wizard lies to the people about who he is and about who Alphaba is. And by the end, Galinda is now lying to the people kind of about who she is, who the wizard is, who Alphaba was.

Speaker 7 And yeah, it's kind of a dark message about the nature of democracy and what you're supposed to be telling people. It's almost a platonic lie that you're supposed to be telling people.

Speaker 7 And it's kind of interesting the musical skirts that. and treats the people as though they're utterly incapable of hearing basic truths about the universe.

Speaker 7 It's something that I disagree with on a fundamental level. I think it's actually the job of leaders to tell the people the things that they don't want to hear, but that happen to be true.

Speaker 7 Also, I'd be remiss if I didn't at least comment briefly on the sort of bizarre PR campaign that's been running from Ariana Grande and Cynthia Arrivo.

Speaker 1 Not the time, helicopter.

Speaker 7 It's gone quite viral in sort of LGBTQ plus minus divided by sign circles.

Speaker 7 The sort of interpersonal relationship between the two, the sort of fanfic that's happening, that all undermines the message of the musical. Obviously, none of the musical works.

Speaker 7 If there is some sort of sexual attraction between Galinda and Alphabot, that's just not the nature of the musical. There are plenty, plenty of LGBTQ plus minus divided by sign-oriented musicals.

Speaker 7 This happens not to be one of them in the main. The attempt to kind of fit it into that box is strange and undermines the friendship basis that is the underlying theme of both the film.

Speaker 7 and the musical in general. And so just as a PR matter, I think it's kind of a strange approach to the PR.
Overall, was I disappointed by it? I wasn't disappointed by it. I thought,

Speaker 7 did I think it was the greatest thing ever put on film? I didn't think that either. And so I'm sorry not to be able to give it like a rave, rave, rave review.

Speaker 7 The only way I think I would have been able to give it a rave review is if the fundamental sin had been corrected at the beginning. This should have been one film.

Speaker 7 The film should have been two hours and 40 minutes. They should have cut out a lot of the fat.
They should have restructured the second act.

Speaker 7 And when you have a second bite at the apple, like you do with Wicked, with this big, gigantic budget and a huge fan base,

Speaker 7 making it more coherent. If you're going to add songs, make them bangers, make them like really great songs, that would have been the thing to do.
So

Speaker 7 I'm more sort of mildly annoyed with the fact that it wasn't what it could have been, but I'm certainly not disappointed with what it ended up being. I am going to.

Speaker 7 That was totally wicked.

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