Author Archives: natezoebl
Predator: Badlands (2025)
This movie plain rules. I was a nominal Predator fan beforehand but these last two movies, both directed by Dan Trachtenberg (10 Cloverfield Lane) and written by Patrick Aison, have taken the concept of a badass alien bounty hunter and made it so much more interesting than its killing prowess. Badlands is the first movie told entirely from a Predator’s perspective, also known as the Yautja. We’re set on an alien world, a proving ground that has claimed many who attempted to make their mark, and we’re following a “little brother” Yautja named Dek who wants to make big brother proud and stick it to dad. There’s also just the general struggle for survival in a hostile world where even the grass can kill you. That’s what I loved about Badlands, how seamlessly it drops you into its perspective and the fascinating sense of discovery along the way. Every ten or so minutes introduces another obstacle, character, or environmental detail that creates such a more vivid picture of this planet, and those details will almost all come back in important and satisfying ways for our climax, proving Dek has learned many lessons. Where the movie goes from great to amazing is when Thia (Elle Fanning) is introduced as a legless android from a Weyalnd-Yutani corporate expedition. It’s a perfect buddy pairing: he’s stoic and inflexible and quiet, and she’s chatty and goofy and friendly. The way the two of them genuinely bond and grow to become allies is surprisingly satisfying on an emotional level, which is not something I thought I’d ever say about a Predator movie. The action is immersive and clever and quite creative with its various details, but the real winning formula is just how structurally sound and engaging it is from the character dynamics. I cared. I celebrated their victories. I celebrated their rewarded faith in one another. Badlands is badass as delightful sci-fi/action but it’s also badass as a funky found family movie that felt like magic. Even if you’ve never enjoyed a Predator movie, or seen one, give Predator: Badlands a well-served trip.
Nate’s Grade: A
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Bugonia (2025)
A remake of a 2003 South Korean movie, Bugonia is an engaging conflict that needed further restructuring and smoothing out to maximize its entertainment potential. Jessie Plemons stars as a disturbed man beholden to conspiracy theories, namely that the Earth is populated with aliens among us that are plotting humanity’s doom. He kidnaps his corporate boss, a cold and cutthroat CEO (Emma Stone), who he is convinced is really an Andromedan and can connect him with the other aliens. The problem here is that the story can only go two routes. Either Plemons’ character is just a dangerous nutball and has convinced himself of his speculation and this will lead to tragic results, or his character will secretly be right despite the outlandish nature and specificity of his conspiracy claims. Once you accept that, it should become more clear which path offers a more memorable and interesting story. The appeal of this movie is the tense hostage negotiation where this woman has to wonder how to play different angles to seek her freedom from a deranged kidnapper. Both actors are at their best when they’re sparring with one another, but I think it was a mistake to establish so much of Plemons and his life before and during the kidnapping. I think the perspective would have been improved following Stone from the beginning and learning as she does, rather than balancing the two sides in preparation. The bleak tone is par for a Yorgos Lanthimos (Poor Things) movie but the attempts at humor, including some over-the-top gore as slapstick, feel more forced and teetering. I never found myself guffawing at any of the absurdity because it’s played more for menace. The offbeat reality that populates a Lanthimos universe is too constrained to the central characters, making the world feel less heightened and weird and therefore the characters are the outliers. I enjoyed portions of this movie, and Stone’s performance has so many layers in every scene, but Bugonia feels like an engaging premise that needed more development and focus to really get buggy.
Nate’s Grade: B-
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Zootopia 2 (2025)
I’m genuinely shocked it took nine years for Disney to drum up a sequel to their billion-dollar “woke” allegorical hit, Zootopia. It used anthropomorphic animals living in a modern metropolis to analyze prejudice, racism, and segregation through the dichotomy of predators (untrustworthy animals beholden to vicious nature) and prey (docile animals). Specifically, it was about plucky police officer Judy Hopps (voiced by Ginnifer Goodwin) learning to work with con artist-turned-ally Nick Wilde (voiced by Justin Bateman). Now the partners are back and on another wild case uncovering yet another long-standing mystery of the city’s history entrenched in blame and suspicion of a “kind of people,” namely serpents/reptiles, who were driven out of town generations ago. There is a slight repetition in the message about looking beyond staid stereotypes and accepting other animals as equals (will Zootopia 3 be about finally accepting insects?), but when the tolerance message is essential to what made the 2016 original movie so much more thoughtful and relevant and satisfying, then keep it. The movie rises on the bickering but engaging buddy dynamic between Judy and Nick, who obviously love one another but don’t know how to admit it (consider me a shipper). The mystery tackles themes of gentrification, forced relocation, on top of its anti-prejudice and pro-tolerance foundation, so there’s plenty to unpack thematically while also taking in the visual whimsy and action slapstick. I laughed heartily at several points, including a very unexpected but transparent reference to a classic horror film complete with heavy music cues. It’s not as fresh or as finely developed as its predecessor but Zootopia 2 is further proof that this universe and its creativity can house many adventures, even if some of those plots and themes get repetitive.
Nate’s Grade: B
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Train Dreams (2025)
What a superb, tender, and deeply humanistic portrayal of life through the eyes of one man, Robert Granier (Joel Edgerton), a logger in Idaho in the early twentieth century. His life isn’t too different from the lives of many. He wants to spend more time with his wife (Felicity Jones) and child, less time away for months on end for logging, and he has difficulty making friends in his profession of hard work and inherent transience. He feels more connection to the natural world, of which he is felling one tree at a time. The nature of the script, adapted from the 2011 novella by author Denis Johnson, is episodic, people coming in and out of this man’s personal life. The narrative feels like a collection of memories, jumping back and forth in time, connected by ideas and imagery like we do in our minds, and providing a sum total for a life lived. There’s an inherent solemnity and awe to the movie, whether it’s about the transcendence of man’s place in the world, the march of progress, or merely the pull of tragedy and love that seeps into our core being. There is a personal tragedy that defines Robert, and it is devastating to experience and process with him. Director/co-writer Clint Bentley (one half of the same creative team behind last year’s Sing Sing, one of the best movies of 2024) uses this character to represent the totality of the human experience, making the movie feel deeply felt and empathetic even decades removed from its subject. That’s because logging isn’t the movie. It’s about the people, places, and experiences that define us. William H. Macy hasn’t been this good in years. You give me a wise, elegiac narrator in the spirit of Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, with such pristine details readily supplied, and I’m already a sucker for your movie. The only thing holding back Train Dreams for me was that post-tragedy doesn’t get the attention I think it deserves. You’d expect the second half of the movie would be the process of grieving and coming to terms, and in essence it is, but the movie is far less direct about its processing, which I felt was a minor misstep for an overall great movie.
Nate’’s Grade: A-
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Tron: Ares (2025)
Known more for its cutting-edge visual effects, the Tron series has long felt like a franchise that Disney keeps trying to reanimate every generation with the hopes that this time, this time, it won’t be ahead of its time and merely of its time and a measurable hit. I think the issue I’ve had with the Tron movies, the original in 1982 and the 2010 glitzy sequel by debut director Joseph Kosinski (Top Gun: Maverick), is that the computer world that the characters get sucked into is, quite simply, boring. The world-building of life inside the computer is dominated by design and less by depth. It’s cool-looking and sleek and alien but it’s also over-glorified setting details without a larger sense of life. That’s probably why every movie has dealt with the threat of the computer world coming into the real world. That’s where Tron: Ares does right, spending far more time in the real world than the computer one, with a flesh-and-blood character (Greta Lee) traveling into the computer realm and a digital one (Jared Leto) traveling out to track her down. On the outside is a war between two tech companies, both racing to be able to replicate structures from the computer world into our own, except they disintegrate after 30 minutes. This is a smart limitation as it naturally presents a goal, to outlast this measure, but it also presents a ticking clock for our computer programs tracking down their missions. Much of the characterization is Leto’s security program, Ares, becoming self-aware and questioning the orders of his superiors, which makes for a pretty predictable arc from a pretty stoic if tedious character. He’s simply the cool fighter that we need for cool fighting, and admittedly, there are plenty of cool fights here. The Tron visual aesthetic of force movements creating warriors makes for some nifty images, especially when those barriers are used for strategic purposes in escapes or combat. You could mentally check out from all the tech mumbo-jumbo and just enjoy the pleasure of the sci-fi action, especially with Nine Inch Nails (really Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross) providing the sonic musical accompaniment. I don’t know if I’ll ever really love a Tron movie but there’s enough offered with Ares that allows me to at least like a Tron movie.
Nate’s Grade: B-
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Keeper (2025)
Director Osgood Perkins is becoming an indie horror household name for Neon with three releases in less than 18 months, each wildly different in approach. Granted, Keeper is more in league with Longlegs than The Monkey, which for me is the less appealing comparison. There really isn’t a whole lot to Keeper in style, theme, or execution. It stars Tatiana Maslany (The Monkey, She Hulk) as a woman visiting her boyfriend’s family cabin in the woods. He leaves for extended periods of time and she starts seeing weird visions of dead women and strange and sinister specters. Until the reveal with fifteen minutes to go, the movie is all ponderous atmospheric noodling, with Maslany slowly losing her mind. There’s a few nifty images but the eventual connection to all this mumbo jumbo is pretty outlandish while at the same time feeling pedestrian, delivered with an unintentionally funny expository speech spelling out everything. All this slow burn anticipation for that? I wish there was more concentration on the main character’s personal psychology beyond lingering doubts she has over whether her boyfriend might be cheating. That’s a fairly humdrum conflict given everything (just go home, girl) and makes the character more a mitigating reflection of him rather than her own character with her own issues and history. Some of the eventual monster designs are nightmarish and memorable but for me it was too-little too-late. I wanted better for Maslany and a horror movie that had more going on under the surface to justify its dithering atmosphere. Keeper is a poorly paced and ultimately thin horror movie better left alone and forgotten.
Nate’s Grade: C
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Hell of a Summer (2025)
You’ve likely seen this kind of movie before, and co-stars/co-writers/co-directors Billy Bryk and Finn Wolfhard (yes, the Stranger Things actor has directed a movie by age 19) are counting on that. Hell of a Summer is a summer camp slasher movie with horny camp counselors trying to score before they get murdered by a masked assailant. The tone, however, is decidedly more heightened and goofy, aiming for more of an unassailable offbeat comedy like Wet Hot American Summer. It works because the horror/thriller elements, and the general mystery of who is the real killer, are never really that compelling, clear pastiche but no more than that. The real entertainment value comes from the silly characters navigating familiar teen troubles like relationships, growing independence, and the scary uncertainty of being an adult, with a heightened seriousness amidst the ridiculous, approaching camp-levels but without being obnoxiously self-aware. That’s why I credit Wet Hot American Summer as its primary influence. There’s a loosely experimental yet admirably confident air to the presentation. Even when the jokes aren’t landing or the pastiche is getting old, I held out with hope that another strange moment might catch my fancy in short order, like Wolfhard being obsessed with the hydration of his peers, or Bryk having a crisis of self-doubt when people suggest the killer is targeting the “hottest counselors” and he’s not been targeted yet. It makes for a silly, inoffensive bauble of a movie with clear affection for its genre influences. If you can’t get on the movie’s comic wavelength, it will make for a slog of 90 minutes. Hell of a Summer might make you smile enough to warrant one pleasant viewing, and who knows, this might just be the beginning of Finn Wolfhard, directing titan.
Nate’s Grade: C+
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After the Hunt (2025)
An unpleasant movie about unpleasant people being unpleasant to one another, After the Hunt is a movie supposedly about ethical dilemmas in academia but it comes across as insufferable people complaining about everything. The framing is about Maggie (Ayo Edebiri), a PhD candidate at Yale, who accuses an older male professor, Hank (Andrew Garfield), of sexual impropriety. He denies it and believes he’s the real victim of a post-Me Too witch hunt, especially after he suspected Maggie of plagiarizing her thesis. Maggie is looking for guidance from her mentor Alma (Julia Roberts) who feels pulled in many directions and unsure whom to believe. Given that premise, you would imagine there would be plenty of scorching drama and intrigue and characters divided by different loyalties and self-interest, especially when all these professors are supposed to be experts on ethics and philosophy too. I found myself so distant and disengaged with the characters because I found them all to be self-involved, cold, and entitled jerks. Worse than all of that, I found them all to be thoroughly boring. Watching After the Hunt feels like you’re trapped at a party with the worst people. That might as well be the moral of the movie: everybody sucks. I wasn’t expecting the characters to be shining examples of heroism, but I wanted them to be a little more interesting and the drama to be more insightful. Alma is our main character and she quietly seethes for most of the movie, that is when she isn’t running to puke into a toilet from her ulcers (symbols!). The movie is replete with characters just whining about “the kids today” and their brittle feelings. You know there’s only so many possibilities given the story; either the assault happened or it didn’t, either Maggie cheated or she didn’t. The score is absurdly discordant and intrusively obnoxious, sounding akin to a rack of instruments falling onto the ground. The abrasive score creates its own unintentionally hilarious jump scares. The more I think about After the Hunt the more I actively dislike it.
Nate’s Grade: C-
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He’s Coming to Get You! (2025)
Kyle Rayburn might just be one of the nicest human beings you’ll ever meet, and he’s admirably unafraid of pursuing his dreams, whether it’s starting a chicken wing food truck or making micro-budget horror comedies in central Ohio. The man has gusto, and it shines through the seams of his hardscrabble yet charming earlier cinematic efforts, Night Work and Satanic Soccer Mom from Ohio. Each of Rayburn’s movies is filmed for under $5000 and shot on an iPhone. He’s in a production groove, promising the next adventure during the credits of his latest completed movie (coming up next: Slam Hounds), and his latest cinematic salvo is the evocatively-titled He’s Coming to Get You!, a title that William Castle surely would have nodded in solemn approval. It’s more or less The Crow by way of Sam Raimi, who even gets name-checked in the movie, a supernatural-fueled revenge thriller with goofy slapstick and self-aware references. It’s a fairly entertaining beginning and ending to a movie that, unfortunately, at just an emaciated 51 minutes in length before end credits, lacks the development for a satisfying exploration between start and finish.
George Russo (Scott Baker, Sulphur for Leviathan) is turning thirty-three and looking forward to a night of cavorting with his long-time girlfriend, Aja (Alyss Winkler, Space Babes From Outer Space). A team of sex traffickers (Jason Crowe, Seth McGuffin – yes, that is his real last name) is determined to capture Aja for their boss. They mug the happy couple and shoot George in his face, killing him and kidnapping Aja. An occult bookstore owner (Grace Plazolles-Hayes) resurrects George through the power of voodoo. He’ll be alive for the remainder of the night, enough time to track and rescue Aja. He’s also a “pain sponge,” meaning that he can take lots of physical punishment and keeps on going, the Energizer Bunny of vengeance, if you will. Can he rescue his beloved before it’s time once again to shuffle from the mortal coil? Will he be able to inflict maximum justice while also trying out some long-sought kung-fu moves?
From that description, you can see how the premise would suffice as a movie for He’s Coming to Get You! (it’s never going to be normal in my brain to type a period after the punctuation in the title). There’s something inherently appealing about revenge stories, and you add a supernatural element that doesn’t just level the playing field for our undead underdog but gives them a key advantage, and we’re hooked. It really is The Crow with a better sense of humor, or, well, any sense of humor. Along those lines, giving our avenging crusader a sense of humor that would fit into Army of Darkness is a great boon. The heavier aspects of the movie like murder, assault, and trafficking are mitigated by having a main character who has definite Bugs Bunny by way of Bruce Campbell energy. It’s the filmmakers way of saying to the audience not to get too worried because the results will be more like an amiable, goofy hangout.
After three movies, I can say that Rayburn and his co-writer/producer Ben Reger love making movies that are, first and foremost, concerned with imparting good times no matter the twisted material. I laughed out loud a few times, like when a thug, seconds before his imminent death, replies forlornly, “I never saw Pari.” I laughed at George attempting a kung-fu move and then berating himself, “Nope, felt wrong the second I tried.” There’s a pair of bumbling cops (played by Rayburn and Reger) that you can tell they have such affection over, even if they seem like the most incompetent cops on the beat. It all encapsulates a certain teenage boy ethos of rock and roll, scatological humor, babes, and cartoonish violence. The infectious vibes of the movie are back and appealing, a feature that can elevate low-budget movies with obvious limitations. It’s the same with the mumblecore movies of the 2010s, low-budget slice-of-life movies buoyed by strong characters and sense of place. There is no budget on engaging storytelling. It’s the same with Rayburn and Reger’s collaborations. Whatever the premise, theirs is a universe you’ll want to make pit stops for the irreverent good times and weirdness.
And that brings me to my biggest hesitation with He’s Coming to Get You!, mainly that in its final form it comes across more of a proof of concept for a bigger movie than feeling like a complete feature. This is primarily because of its length and the rushed development skipped over for an abbreviated Act Two. The total running time before end credits is 51 minutes, but if you subtract the opening credits that play over the montage of George getting up for the morning, that’s an additional three and a half minutes, taking the running time to a paltry 48 minutes or so, fitting an hour of network TV rather than a feature-length film. From a structural standpoint, George is killed at the 21-minute mark, resurrected and sent on his mission at the 31-minute mark, foils the bad guys by the 46-minute mark, and then the movie ends at minute 51. That’s it. It’s hard not to feel a little cheated; the “coming to get you” part of the title is only 15 minutes. Imagine The House on Haunted Hill but you’re only on Haunted Hill for all of ten minutes.
The movie is sprinting through potential plot and further world-building that would help to make its storytelling feel more original and engrossing. Once George is resurrected, he is given great powers but there aren’t any notable rules on the powers besides the fact that they, and he, will expire upon morning. The villains never really have a chance to even process their new adversary as he just shows up, kills them, and then wins the day on his first attempt. The absent struggle and creative development hampers some of the fun, like the movie was in a rush to call it quits over practical considerations. After George is resurrected, there’s one other group he gets to test his new powers on before it’s already time to eliminate the people who killed him. In The Crow, the main character targeted the gang of killers one-by-one, with them learning about this new threat gradually and planning counter-moves. The way it plays out in this movie is all too easy. It’s like an acknowledgement that an audience won’t want to watch a full movie of a supernatural hero getting everything he wants too easily, but the answer isn’t to just shorten the movie, it’s to better develop the premise and ensuing conflicts and challenges and unique world-building. I’d rather watch a version of this movie where George has to figure out his powers and has certain rules and limits than a speed-run to the finish without any interesting challenges, organic complications, or surprises.
There is one moment toward the very end of He’s Coming to Get You! that I feel is emblematic of the positives and drawbacks of the development, but it involves some mild spoilers since it concerns the conclusion, so be advised, dear reader. Aja and George are reunited and finally get some privacy in the bedroom. Aja has been promising quite a bevy of sexual activity for George’s birthday. They’re finally alone, she performs a strip tease, then she crawls into bed and the movie cuts to them just talking and laughing. I thought that was a nice subversion. They have one final night together, so why spend it on physical copulation when you could wile away the hours talking to your favorite person, hearing their laugh, reminding yourself why you love them before they’re gone for good? Besides, having sex with a resurrected dead body, who has been stabbed and beaten throughout the movie, might make for an extremely upsetting final memory of your lover. Plus there’s the whole possible joke of being unable to control blood flow since, you know, blood doesn’t flow anymore anyway. I thought this was clever and sweet. Then it’s revealed that George and Aja did indeed have their sex off-screen and this is just post-coital pillow talk rather than a subversive replacement. Oh? Oh well then.
After three movies, I can start to catalogue the Kyle Rayburn film experience: silly comedy cul-de-sacs, low stakes regardless of circumstance, celebration of schlock, amiable vibes, actors having fun regardless of experience, lo-fi visuals, minimal if any coverage beyond shot-reverse shot edits, and underdeveloped stories. This has been my chief criticism with each of Rayburn’s previous movies, that they benefit from fun ensembles and intriguing premises but that more work could have been done to better realize the potential of each. I often walk away from these movies thinking we got the first draft onscreen. He’s Coming to Get You! is the most real world setting in a Rayburn vehicle, so there aren’t as many interesting characters or details to the world to cover some of those plotting shortcomings, so the vacancy becomes more notable and damaging to the entertainment. It’s easy to graft onto the relaxed, schlocky wavelength of the movie but by the end I felt a little shortchanged in creativity and execution, missing a movie middle. I’m happy Rayburn is following his dreams and has built a staple of returning players. He’s Coming to Get You! has enough going for it that I wish the team had dug in more. I only wish that whatever the next three or four projects prove to be, that Rayburn and his team take more time to really work through their particular story conventions to make them the best version they can be, not just completed.
Nate’s Grade: C+
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Wicked: For Good (2025)
To paraphrase a famous debate line, I knew Wicked, Wicked was one of my top films of 2024, and you, Wicked: For Good, are no Wicked. Obviously that’s not completely true as For Good is the second half of the adaptation of the popular Broadway musical, of which only the first act compromised the prior movie released a year ago. The problem was that the first Wicked movie felt complete, and had there never been another second after, it would have served as a fitting and even moving portrait of the unknown back-story to the Wicked Witch of the West and the implied propaganda that would taint the perception of the citizens of Oz. The movie was two hours and forty minutes but it felt extremely well-paced and developed. It felt, more or less, complete, even though I know it was only adapting half the musical. In short, it did too good of a job, and now Wicked: For Good suffers as a sequel because what’s left to tell just isn’t as compelling or as emotionally or thematically coherent as its charming predecessor. Plus, all the banger songs were clearly in the first movie.
After the events of the first movie, Elphaba (Cynthia Erivio) has assumed the mantle of the Wicked Witch of the West and is sabotaging the Wizard of Oz’s (Jeff Goldblum) plans at expansion and animal abuse. Glinda (Ariana Grande) is the Wizard’s public ambassador and the “good witch” to inspire the masses, even though she doesn’t possess actual magical abilities. Glinda wishes dearly that Elphaba will change her mind and decide to work with her and the Wizard. However, Elphaba wants to expose corruption, and the Wizard is at the top of her list of the corrupt and powerful needing to be toppled for good.
For Good suffers from the adaptation struggles the 2024 Wicked film was able to avoid. The first movie was an effervescent treat built upon a poignant friendship and some killer songs given the full showstopper visual treatment. It was a vibrant adaptation, and while it expanded upon the stage show significantly, the extra time with the characters felt like breathing space, and it all contributed to what felt to me like an extremely well paced and well developed and arguably complete movie experience. Now the second act of a musical is almost always the shorter of the two, and For Good is about 30 minutes shorter than its predecessor. The filmmakers even added two new songs for Oscar eligibility and further padding, neither of which are winners (more on the songs later in the review). That sense of care is not present in For Good, as characters are frustratingly repeating beats they already worked through. Take for instance Glinda, who begins the first movie as an entitled popular girl used to getting her own way, and by the end of the movie, she’s grown to see the world differently and through her sisterly friendship with Elphaba, she has a more empathetic and grounded perspective. She has already changed for the better, and yet in For Good it feels like the movie kicks her character growth backwards. She has to again learn that maybe the Wizard and others are not the best people in charge just because they are. Wicked is a victim of its own success. The character development and arc was so well realized in the first movie that Glinda feels like she’s repeating lessons she’s already learned. I also don’t buy Elphaba being seriously tempted by the Wizard’s offer of collaboration after all she experienced and learned earlier. It’s irksome to have the characters seem curiously different from where we left them in 2024’s Wicked. There is also a character relationship revelation that I and many others had figured out FROM THE OPENING SCENE of the first movie. Behold, dear reader, For Good doesn’t even address this until the last twenty minutes of the movie and it does absolutely nothing with this revelation. I was flabbergasted.
The biggest time-waster and padding is when Wicked drags The Wizard of Oz characters and plot incidents awkwardly into its own universe. Granted, the entire enterprise is supposed to be the unknown back-story for the villain of The Wizard of Oz which gives it its identity. Except Dorothy and her lot are not essential at all to telling this story, as evident with the sense that the 2024 Wicked could feel complete. Dorothy and her motley crew of locals, some of whom are made up of previously established characters, are given the Rosencrantz and Gildenstern treatment, meaning they’re primarily kept off-screen and incidental. You don’t even see Dorothy’s face once. These characters feel annoyingly tacked-on and inconsequential to the story we’ve already spent three hours with. They’re knowing nods for the audience and they’re also making efforts to better pad out the running time. I don’t fully comprehend their importance in this new retelling. The treacherous Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh) sees the presence of Dorothy as an advantageous development, like she can use her as a Chosen One to thwart Elphaba. It’s never remotely explained why this makes sense. Why this person versus any other Oz citizen? Dorothy possesses special shoes but we’ve seen what can be accomplished with them. They’re not really some superpower or a weapon, more an item of personal attachment for Elphaba she would like returned. In this retelling, the entire inclusion of Dorothy and her friends is a means to an end for a public ruse. It might seem odd to say this Wizard of Oz back-story would have been better minus Dorothy but there it is.
Now it’s time to discuss the actual songs for this movie musical. The best known and most popular tunes were all in the first act and thus the first movie. The songs for For Good are a combination of middling ballads and continuation of the leitmotifs and themes of the previous one. There’s perhaps a bigger emotional current when characters bring back melodies and lyrics from the first movie to expand or contrast, like “I’m Not That Girl.” Did you want another song with Goldblum singing? The biggest number is “For Good” where Elphaba and Glinda face off and admit their shared sisterly love for one another, but again this was already established by the end of 2024’s Wicked. It’s more explicitly stated through song but the sentiment was evident to me already. Adding further disappointment, returning director John M. Chu (Into the Heights, Crazy Rich Asians) lacks the same thoughtful staging of the musical numbers in this edition. He is a filmmaker who innately knows how to adapt stage musicals into the medium of film, and he did so splendidly with 2024’s Wicked. With For Good, the staging lacks a real immersion and visual dynamism, often murky or overly saturated, like “No Good Deed” being performed almost entirely with intrusive sunsetting silhouettes dominating the screen. The less engaging songs, added with less engaging visual staging, make the movie feel longer and less jubilant. I don’t know if “For Good” has the intended emotional crescendo simply because this movie isn’t nearly as good.
As a personal note, the 2024 Wicked was the last movie I saw in theaters with my father while he was alive. We were supposed to see Gladiator II together as a family after Thanksgiving but he wasn’t feeling up to it, and then a little more than two weeks later he was unresponsive. I’m happy Wicked was such a pleasant and enjoyable experience for him, but as we left the theater, he asked me, “Wasn’t there supposed to be more?” We had seen the stage show when it toured through our city many years ago, and I remarked that there was going to be a whole second movie adapting the second act of the musical and it was going to be released in a year. He nodded and I felt the silent acknowledgement shared between us: he would not be around to see the conclusion, that it was a future unavailable to him. So it’s hard for me to not have some melancholy feelings with For Good, and I’ll admit maybe that’s influencing my critique.
Wicked: For Good is a frustrating, disappointing extension of what had been a sterling and magical original movie. It doesn’t outright ruin what came before it but confirms for me that 2024’s Wicked could stand on its own. The songs aren’t as good. The staging and visuals aren’t as good. The character development feels repeated and occasionally confounding. The plotting is stretched and unsatisfying. The inclusion of the more direct Wizard of Oz characters feels arbitrary and unnecessary. The actors are still charming and affecting and sing wonderfully, but they’re also unable to defy the gravity of the material they’re stuck with. If you’re a super fan of the source material, albeit the original story by L. Frank Baum, the 1939 Wizard of Oz movie, the Gregory Maguire book, the 2000s stage musical, or even the first movie, you will probably find enough to sing along to and walk away fairly happy. I loved the 2024 Wicked and was left mostly cold at the concluding half but I realize I very well may be a curmudgeonly minority here. My advice would be to consider the 2024 Wicked a complete movie and skip For Good.
Nate’s Grade: C+
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