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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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Hundreds of Beavers (2024)
It’s become a cliche for film critics to say, “you’ve never seen a movie like this,” and that’s only partially true with the DIY indie comedy sensation, Hundreds of Beavers. You may have seen this before though decades ago in classic Looney Tunes cartoons, a clear inspiration for the inventive visual slapstick and antic comedy imagination on full display. The commitment of the cast and crew to make a modern-day Looney Tunes is so rare and the results so amazingly executed that when I questioned whether we needed a full movie of this rather than a short film, I cast aside the question and chose to simply enjoy the fullness of the movie. Why scrimp on imagination and ingenuity and divine wackiness for only fifteen minutes when we can have one hundred? If you’re a fan of inspired slapstick comedy, and especially the Golden Era of classic cartoons (1944-1964), then Hundreds of Beavers will be a celebratory experience that could boast hundreds of laughs.
Set amid the early 1800s in the Wisconsin winter, Jean Kayak (Ryland Brickson Cole Tews) is a frontiersman trying to make a name for himself. He wants to be the best fur trapper in the land, and if he nets enough furs, he’ll be granted the chance to marry the pretty daughter (Olivia Graves) of the local Merchant (Doug Mancheski). And with that, the rest of the movie is watching Jean try to outsmart the wildlife (portrayed as people in giant mascot costumes) and collect enough pelts.
By the nature of its premise and intention, this is not going to be a movie for everyone, or even many, but if it’s for you, it will feel like comedy manna from heaven. The grand appeal of Hundreds of Beavers is the sheer surprise of it all, with the jokes coming fast. The pacing of this movie is at spoof-movie levels, with jokes hitting in weaves and often, complete setups and punchlines taken care of in under ten seconds. The joke-per-second ratio of this movie is off the charts, especially when the movie also begins building its own internal logic and foundation for running gags. That creates an even deeper and richer tableau for comedy, with jokes piling on top of one another and building escalations and extensions. I’m genuinely amazed at the creativity on display in every minute of this movie. The fantastical imagination of this movie could power an entire Hollywood studio slate of movies. I was in sheer awe of how many different joke scenarios it could devise with this scant premise, and I was happily surprised, no, elated, when the filmmakers kept this level of silliness and invention going until the very end of the movie. I was chuckling and guffawing throughout, and I strongly feel like this is the kind of movie that, if you watch it with a group of like-minded friends, can produce peals of infectious laughter.
I really want to celebrate just how whimsically silly this movie can be, with humor that ranges from clever to stupid to stupidly clever. Much of the humor resides around the death and mutilation of animals, which isn’t surprising considering our hero’s goal is to gain hundreds of pelts. It never stops being funny seeing people dressed in giant animal mascot costumes to represent the wildlife, and when they’re killed through the assortment of different means and accidents, the movie adopts classic cartoon visual communication and logic by giving them large X’s covering their eyes. Even when the creatures are losing heads and limbs and getting impaled or giant holes blown through them, the lightness of approach keeps the violence from feeling upsetting or realistic. It’s all just so silly, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not sneaky-smart from a comedy standpoint. There’s one scene where Jean is riding a log down a flume inside a giant wood-harvesting plant the beavers have constructed. A rival log with angry beavers chases him in parallel, and it looks like they’re just about to jump onto his log and grab him. However, they jump but seemingly stay in place, and that’s where the movie cuts to a different shot from a wide angle, to reveal that there are four or five of these flumes running parallel and not merely two. The joke itself is only a few careful seconds, like most of the jokes in Hundreds of Beavers, but it demonstrates the level of thought and ingenuity in the comedy construction, and that’s even before spaceships and beaver kaiju.
The acting is fully committed to the exaggerated and cartoonish tone of the proceedings. These actors are selling the jokes tremendously well, and since the movie is practically wordless, most of it comes from physicality and expression. It hearkens back to the early silent era of moviemaking by the likes of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplain making millions laugh. Even the smallest roles are filled with committed actors helping to make the jokes even funnier. The people in those mascot costumes can be riotous simply in how they slump their body, cock their head, choose their pauses and gesticulations. Watching the movie is a reminder at how universal comedy can be when you have the right people who understand the fundamentals of finding the funny. Tews, also serving as co-writer with director Mike Cheslike (L.I.P.S., The Get Down), is our human face for much of the mayhem, and he can play bedeviled and befuddled with flair. His facial expressions and exaggerations are a consistent key to framing and anchoring the tone of every moment.
While the budget is a relatively modest $150,000, it doesn’t mean the movie looks pedestrian. Choosing to film in black and white helps mask some possible limitations, and the creative choice to go with people in giant mascot costumes helps too, but much of the movie is elevated by its clever green screen effects work. Whether it’s augmenting the snowy outdoor wilderness with exaggerated elements, like traps and contraptions and holes in ice, or segments filmed entirely on green screen and utilizing heavy composites to magnify the number of animals on screen, it all better fulfills the vision and tone. The finale inside the beaver complex is a wild sequence reminiscent of Marvin the Martian landscapes and interior design. The look of the movie, while rough around the edges at points, leans into its lo-fi aesthetics to make it part of its charm, much like the goofy mascot costumes. The continued goofiness doesn’t cancel out the visual audaciousness, even when that audacity is in the guise of creating something so stupid for words.
I would advise anyone to give Hundreds of Beavers a try, even if for only ten minutes. If you don’t connect with the film’s comedic wavelength or appreciate the ingenuity of the players, then so be it. But I think more than enough will be charmed and impressed by its energy and creativity. I said before that there was once or twice, during the first half, that I questioned whether we needed a feature-length version of this kind of movie. Then it occurred to me how rare such a movie like this is, how singular its vision can be, and how instead of questioning its duration, I then chose to celebrate its cheerful existence, and every new joke was a new opportunity to produce smiles and laughter, and I anxiously waited for the next and the next, my smile only broadening. Hundreds of Beavers is one of the craziest movies you will see but it’s also, at its core, a celebration of comedy and collaboration and the special appeal of moviemaking and those with a passion for being silly. In these trying times of uncertainty, I’ll take a feature-length dose of that, please and thank you.
Nate’s Grade: A
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Wicked: Part One (2024)
It’s shocking that it took this long for Wicked to make its way from the Broadway stage to the big screen. The musical, based upon Gregory Maguire’s novel, began in 2003 and while it may have lost out on the biggest Tony Awards that year to Avenue Q (it seems astonishing now but… you just had to be there in 2004, theater kids) the show has been a smash for over two decades, accruing over a billion dollars as the second highest-grossing stage show of all time. As show after show got its turn as a movie, I kept wondering what was taking so long with an obviously mass appealing show like Wicked. It’s the classic Hollywood desire of “same but different,” a reclamation project for none other than the Wicked Witch of the West, retelling her tale from her perspective. Well, Wicked’s time has eventually dawned, and the studio is going to feast upon its protracted wait. Taking a page from the YA adaptation trend that dominated the 2010s, they’ve split the show into two movies, separated by a full year, hoping to better capitalize on the phenomenon. I was wary about Part One being 150 minutes, the same length as the ENTIRE Wicked stage show, but having seen the finished product, and by “finished” I mean one half, I can safely say that Wicked is genuinely fabulous and deftly defies the gravity of expectations.
In the fantasy world of Oz, the green-skinned outcast Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) is looked at with scorn, derision, and fear. She’s always been different and never fully accepted by her father who blames her for her mother’s death and her younger sister Nessarose (Marissa Bode) being stricken to a wheelchair. Nessa is going to study at Shiz University with all the other up-and-coming coeds of the land of Oz, including Glinda (Arianna Grande), a popular and frivolous preppie gal peppered in pink pastels. Glinda desperately wants to be taken seriously and become a witch, studying magic under the tutelage of the esteemed Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh). Instead, Morrible’s fascination falls upon Elphaba after she reveals her tremendous magical ability in a moment of extreme emotion. Now Elphaba is enrolled at the magic school and learning about the way of the world, and she’s stuck with Glinda as her roommate. The two women couldn’t be any more different but over the course of the movie, we’ll uncover how one became Glinda the Good and the other the Wicked Witch of the West.
At two-and-a-half hours long, again the length of both acts of the stage show, Wicked Part One only covers the events of the show’s first act, and yet it feels complete and satisfying and, even most surprising, extremely well paced. It’s hard for me to fathom what could have been lost to get the running time down as each scene adds something valuable to our better understanding of these characters and their progression and the discovery of the larger world. It’s a movie that feels constantly in motion, propelling forward with such winning ebullient energy that it becomes infectious. It’s also not afraid to slow things down, to allow moments to breathe, and to provide further characterization and shading that wasn’t included in the stage show. The adaptation brings the fireworks for the finale and raises the visual stakes and danger in a manner that feels exciting and compellingly cinematic. Considering the resplendent results, I feel I could argue that the movie is actually -here comes the heretical hyperbole, theater kids- an improvement over the stage musical. It makes me even more excited for a bolder, longer, potentially even more emotionally satisfying second part in November 2025.
One of my primary praises for 2021’s In the Heights was that director John M. Chu, who cut his teeth helming the Step Up movies, knows exactly how to adapt musicals to maximize the potential of the big screen. If you’re a fan of musicals, old and new, you’ll find yourself swept away with the scope and intricacy of these large fantasy worlds, the flourishes of costume and production design, as well as the creative choreography making fine use of spaces and the power of film editing. There’s a rousing dance sequence set in a library with shelves that rotate around the room, making the slippery choreography that much more immersive, impressive, and acrobatic. Even big crowd numbers are given the knowing framing and sense of scale to hit their full potential, from the opening rendition of Munchkinland celebrating the death of the Wicked Witch of the West complete with giant burning effigy that would make a Wickerman envious, to the introduction to the City of Oz where it appears every citizen has a jovial role to play in welcoming strangers to their enchanted capital city. Chu’s nimble camerawork allows us to really enjoy the staging and skills of the talent onscreen, bringing a beating sense of vitality we crave from musical theater writ large. Wicked is simply one of the best stage-to-screen adaptations in musical theater history and a joyous experience that allows the viewer sumptuous visuals.
At its core, the story of Wicked is about some pretty resonant themes like self-acceptance, bullying, the fear of what is different or misunderstood, and all of this is built upon an irresistible friendship between Glinda and Elphaba. The rivals-to-allies formula isn’t new but it is tremendously effective and satisfying, especially when both characters are as well drawn and deserving of our empathy as these two ladies. They’re each on a different meaningful character arc for us to chart their personal growth and disillusion with what they’ve been taught is The Way Things Are. One is starting from a disadvantaged position and gaining traction through an outward demonstration of power, and the other is beginning in a position of privilege and becoming humble and more considerate as she acknowledges the challenges of others in a manner that doesn’t have to reconfirm her enviable “goodness.” It just works, and both women are fantastic in their roles. I was on the verge of tears at several points and my heart felt as full as a balloon throughout because of the emotional engagement and heartwarming camaraderie between our two leading ladies. With all its razzle dazzle, Wicked is a story of feminine friendship first and foremost and emotionally rewarding to experience, with the soaring music as a bonus.
Let’s finally talk about the music, a key factor in the enjoyment of any musical, naturally. The music was written by Stephen Schwartz, the Oscar-winning composer for “Colors of the Wind” from Pocahontas as well as “Believe” from The Prince of Egypt. I found his Wicked numbers to range from good to astoundingly good, with catchy ear-worms like “Popular” to the anthemic power and sweep of “Defying Gravity.” The cheeky and toe-tapping “Dancing Through Life” is a showcase for Jonathan Bailey (Bridgerton) and benefits from the aforementioned creative library choreography. “I’m Not That Girl” is a heartbreaking ode to the girls who don’t think of themselves as enough, which is begging for a reappearance in Part Two. The only clunker is “A Sentimental Man” but that’s more the result of the deficiencies of Jeff Goldblum as a singer than the song. I await the reuse of themes and motifs that will make the music even more thematically rich in the eventual Part Two.
Count me as part of the skeptical throng when it was announced that Grande, who hasn’t acted in over ten years, was cast as Glinda. I’m here to say that she is uniformly great. The Glinda role is the more outwardly showy role and thus immediately more memorable. It’s the far more comedic role, in fact the main source of comedy in the show, and Grande has serious comedic chops. Naturally she excels with the singing and its purposeful miasmic bombast, but it’s the subtle comedic styling and the exaggerated physicality that impressed me the most, like a moment of her twirling on the floor as an added dramatic flourish. There’s one scene where she’s just marching up and down a hallway in full exuberance, kicking, dancing, and exploding with joy. I anticipated that Erivo (Bad Times at the El Royale) would be exceptional, and of course the Broadway vet is, as she brings such simmering life to Elphaba. There’s a strength in equal measure to her vulnerability, making the character fully felt. Erivo also delivers during the big moments, like the climax of the movie that can give you goosebumps in hiw it weaves together empowerment and defiance and self-acceptance. Together, the two women are an unbreakable pair of performers and heroes that we’ll want to see triumph over adversity.
After decades of belabored waiting, Wicked finally makes its journey from stage to screen and I must say it was worth every minute. The film, even at only one half, feels complete and richly realized, building upon the strong foundation of the stage show and its numerous winning elements and masterfully translating them to cinema, taking full advantage of the visual possibilities while also expanding upon the story and themes for further enrichment. While born in the early 2000s War on Terror Bush era of politics, Wicked’s themes of anti-immigrant fear-mongering as scapegoats still bears striking resonance today, as do the emerging warnings of fascism in Oz. If you’re a fan of The Wizard of Oz, musical theater, or even just grandiose spectacle that doesn’t dilute grandiose feelings, then step into Wicked and you too will feel like you’re floating on air.
Nate’s Grade: A
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The Wild Robot (2024)
There must be something personally appealing when it concerns movies about hopeful robots that serve as change agents to new communities. WALL-E and The Iron Giant are two of my favorite films of all time, and while The Wild Robot won’t quite enter that all-hallowed echelon, it’s still a heartfelt and lovely movie that can appeal to anyone. We follow Roz (voiced by Lupita Nyong’o), a discarded robot looking for tasks to complete on an island. Fortunately, the robot learns how to communicate with the local wildlife, including a baby goose that our robot feels responsible to train how exactly to be a goose, including how to fly before the advent of winter and the larger flock migrates. The characters are kept pretty simple but that doesn’t mean their emotions are. The movie, based upon a popular children’s book series by Peter Brown, is refreshingly mature about nature’s life cycle, not treating death like a taboo subject too dark for children. The themes of parenting, being different, and finding an accepting home through compassion and courage are all resonant no matter your age, and I’m happy to report that I teared up at several points. The parent-child relationship between the damaged robot and orphaned gosling extends beyond them, inspiring other members of the island’s food chain to work together for common goals and sustainability. There’s a late antagonist thrown in to up the stakes and provide a bit more explosive action, including a magnetic magenta-colored forest fire. The movie doesn’t quite close as strongly as it opens, but writer/director Chris Sanders (Lilo & Stitch, How to Train Your Dragon) knows innately how to execute at such a high level where even simple characters and familiar themes have fully developed stories with soaring emotions that arrive fully earned.
Nate’s Grade: B+
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Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey 2 (2024)
The first Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey was, unquestionably, my worst film of 2023. It wasn’t merely a bad horror movie, it was a depressingly cynical cash-grab with such little forethought of how to subvert the wholesome legacy of its classic characters. As I said in my review: “The startling lack of imagination of everything else is depressing, as is the fact that this movie has earned over four million at the global box-office, hoodwinking enough rubberneckers looking for a good bad time. The problem is that Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey is only a bad bad time.” Oh, dear reader, I wasn’t looking forward to the inevitable deluge of follow-ups, as writer/director Rhys Frake-Waterfield would resupply his surprising success with further sinister revisions to public domain properties. He’s planning on a “Poohniverse” crossover event with a combination of Pooh, evil Pinnochio, vengeance-fuelled Bambi, and a traumatized or villainous Peter Pan. Again, schlocky movies that lean into their schlock can be wonderful things, but a movie that does next to nothing with its subversive hook, with the history of its cutesy iconography, and could be easily replaced with any other menacing slasher killer is beyond lazy, it’s insulting. I figured there could be nowhere to go but up with a sequel, and while Blood and Honey 2 is an improvement in just about every way, it’s still not enough to qualify as a fun or ironic treat.
Wakefield and new co-writer Matt Leslie (Summer of 84) completely rework the mythology and history established in the first movie, which is now revealed to be the literal movie-within-a-movie of the account of the Massacre of the 100 Acre Wood where Pooh and Piglet slaughtered a troupe of bad-acting British coeds. In this prior film, it was established that Pooh and his buddies were angry with Christopher Robin (Scott Chambers, replacing Nikolai Leon) when he left for college. They felt abandoned and grew feral and monstrous, rejecting the ways of man (though still wearing the clothes of man and driving the cars of man). However, now in the sequel it’s revealed they were always feral and blood-thirsty and it was Christopher who incorrectly remembered them as cute and fluffy. This scene makes for the hilarious visual of a child waving innocently at a blood-strewn manimal lurking about. Also, Christopher had a young brother who was abducted by the creatures of the 100 Acre Wood and never seen again. Also also, there was a mad scientist who was creating human-animal hybrids from missing children, so the blood-thirsty animals might not be actual animals after all (can you see where this is going?). While the first Blood and Honey movie did nothing with the characters, this movie actively gives them a tragic history with some twists and turns, enough to lay a mythos. The use of hypnotherapy-induced flashbacks isn’t exactly smooth or subtle, but I’ll take it. At least this movie provides a distinguishing plot that makes some use of its particular elements. Don’t mistake me, dear reader, this is faint praise at best, but after enduring the creatively bankrupt first film, it’s like a desperately needed oasis. Ultimately, it might all just be a mirage but at least it’s something to those of us who suffered!
In the grand sequel tradition, bigger is better, and now instead of two ferocious beasts wreaking havoc, it’s four, with the addition of Owl (Marcus Massey) and Tigger (Lewis Santer). None of these monsters has a particular style or attitude that distinguishes them. I guess Tigger calls people “bitch” a lot and slashes people. There is one point where hapless cops are investigating a crime scene and say, “Let’s bounce,” and Tigger says from the luxury of the shadows, “Hey, that’s my line.” I figured they’d incorporate the signature Tigger bounce on his tail, but perhaps that was too expensive to perform or that bounce was more a byproduct of the Disney version of the character, still under copyright, and not the available A.A. Milne version. The animal costumes look better than the cheap Halloween masks of the original, though for my money Owl looks more like a turkey vulture wearing cray paper. I’m sure we’ll get Kanga in the inevitable third movie in 2025 where her zombie baby leaps out of her pouch to feed on brains. There is a snazzy addition late into the proceedings where Pooh is welding a fiery chainsaw. It makes little sense for the character but it’s cool, so it’s excusable in lapsed movie logic.
I was hoping for more unique kills, twisted takes related to the characters, like Pooh turning some poor soul’s head into a honeypot. The kills are just grizzly and extensive, favoring quantity over quality. There are plenty of decapitations, gougings, impalings, and other fraught and violent encounters, nearly all of them featuring squealing, terrified women. It’s always women that seem to get the worst in these movies, but of course this is a feature and not a bug of the genre back to its 80s heyday. It gets relentless but I suppose at least these girls aren’t having their tops mysteriously fall off while they’re being butchered. A third act rave set piece features maybe two dozen kills and risks becoming tedious slaughter. It got to the point where I was hoping not to see another cowering person hiding behind a corner because it meant the sequence was going to be even more unbearably long (I’m not personally cut out for the Terrifiers).
In between the spillings of blood and guts is the attempts at human drama, namely Christopher Robin trying to live a normal life while also re-examining his past. Apparently people think he’s to blame for the massacre from the 100 Acre Wood, and so he’s become a pariah, whose very presence unsettles others. He’s trying to find steady work in a hospital setting but he’s blacklisted from pursuing his career because of the negative attention his name generates. He even has a romance with a single mom so that when the Robin family is inevitably skewered we have other characters that can be personally threatened to provide meaningful stakes. The life of Christopher Robin and his discovery of repressed memories makes for a surprising story foundation for Blood and Honey 2, especially when the plot of its predecessor was mostly Christopher being held prisoner and the baddies casually roaming and killing coeds. I think Chambers is a better actor as well, and he’s posed to be the writer/director of Neverland Nightmares, which just began principal photography a month and a half ago as of this writing. Good luck, guy.
While the budget has increased tenfold, Blood and Honey 2 is still a scuzzy, sleazy slasher movie at heart. If you’re in the mood for a low-budget exploitation movie heavy with gore, there may be enough to qualify this sequel as moderately mediocre, which again is a marked improvement from what I declared the worst movie of 2023. I’ll credit the influence of co-writer Matt Leslie to try and put some standards in place for this runaway gravy train of IP allocation. What’s scariest of all is what Frake-Waterfield’s unexpected success has wrought, encouraging imitators to jump on his now proven novelty act. There’s a 2025 Steamboat Willie horror movie called Screamboat as Steamboat Willie has now entered the public domain (but not other versions of Mickey). Will it be any good? I sincerely doubt it. Will it make money from curious horror hounds looking for an ironic twist on a wholesome childhood fixture? Most assuredly. This is our present. This is our future, and it’s the legacy of Frake-Waterfield and his ilk that stumbled onto a lucrative novelty act. Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey 2 is just bad, and for that it’s an improvement.
Nate’s Grade: D+
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Robot Dreams (2023)
What a delightfully tender little movie Robot Dreams proves to be. It’s based on a picture book and its story is mostly about a lonely Dog who orders a build-your-own-robot for companionship and their friendship. Much of the movie hinges on the Robot being trapped on a Long Island beach closed for the season, so our intrepid Dog must go on living in his New York City apartment through the seasons while he waits to rescue his friend. The movie is wordless and based upon a picture book, but that doesn’t mean this is chiefly kid’s stuff. It touches upon the profound with such elegance and efficiency, brilliantly relatable and recognizably human. It’s all about our need for connections, and even when they are separated, both the Dog and Robot find other connections with other characters, and then it comes back to our worry that they won’t actually reunite after being apart for the majority of the movie. I was reading some gay coding between the two as well but maybe that was my own projection. My nine-year-old son was quite taken with the movie and could easily follow along, though he was also very much not a fan of the bittersweet ending, his first taste of providing the whole “what you need, not what you want” conclusion. Robot Dreams is lovingly realized, its animation so clean and crisp with wonderful characters populating an alternative 1980s NYC. It’s simple and sweet and irresistible.
Nate’s Grade: A-
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The Boy and the Heron (2023)
It’s been over ten years since renowned animation legend Hiyao Miyazaki graced the silver screen with what was believed to be his last film yet the retirement didn’t kick, for the benefit of all of us. I’ve resisted watching 2013’s The Wind Rises simply because of the melancholy of it supposedly being his final film. The man is in his 80s and still hand draws much of his storyboards, so if indeed this is the last Miyazaki movie we ever get, it ties thematically with many of the concepts and interests of this man’s storied career that it feels like a fitting capper. It’s his most autobiographical, following 12-year-old Mahito as he relocates to the country after surviving the firebombing of Tokyo during World War II. Unfortunately, he lost his mother in the bombing, and now his father is remarrying his mother’s younger sister, who looks near identical to Mahito’s mother. On the grounds of his new home, the boy discovers a strange overgrown tower with a door that leads to another world, and it’s within this world that a creepy scary bird promises Mohito can find his mother again. The Boy and the Heron is an imaginative and transporting fantasy with some major themes around the edges about grief and acceptance and environmental disaster, but it’s the haphazard structure and poor pacing that hold it back for me. Simply, it’s too long to get going and then too short to conclude. We don’t exit to the hidden fantasy world until almost halfway through, and the time in the regular world is stretched out, especially without going into further detail about our protagonist, who is kept very opaque. The discovery of the new world and learning its strange mostly bird creatures and rules and conflicts is where the movie really gets interesting, especially once the menacing heron becomes a squat man serving as our reluctant guide. It feels like there’s going to be some heavy revelations forthcoming, especially with the supposed duplicate nature of Mohito’s mothers, but it all comes down to an aged Man Behind the Curtain with a reveal straight out of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. We take too long to get to that intriguing fantasy world, and then once we’re there it feels a little too surface-level in design for a world on the cusp of dying. Then it’s a mad scramble to leave, and while the culminating decision feels earned in its wisdom, it also feels like the movie has simply run out of ideas. The Boy and the Heron is beautifully animated; the world feels like it’s undulating before your eyes, and there are numerous moments that allow it to breathe. However, it feels like maybe we could have gotten started sooner and finished a little later. Even mid-level Miyazaki is better than most, so The Boy and the Heron is still a worthwhile animated fantasy even if it doesn’t reach masterpiece status from a master storyteller. At least now I can finally watch The Wind Rises, so there’s that too.
Nate’s Grade: B
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Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem (2023)
As an elder millennial, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles have been a formative franchise for me. I grew up on the cartoon, got the toys for Christmas, died endlessly during the shockingly hard underwater stage of their Nintendo video game, and generally have a soft spot in my 80s nostalgia for the likes of Leonardo, Donatello, Raphael, and Michelangelo, plus their surrogate father, Master Splinter. Apparently Seth Rogen felt the same way, and he and his writing partner Evan Goldberg have spearheaded a new animated variation of TMNT that just so happens to also be co-written and directed by the man behind my favorite film of 2021, The Mitchells vs. The Machines. It was a recipe to guarantee my personal enjoyment, and Mutant Mayhem thusly delivered. The biggest selling point for me was how lovingly realized the “teenage” part of the title was, getting a foursome of actual adolescents to portray our heroes, and using high school experience about acceptance and fitting in as effective and even poignant parallels. I loved just hanging out with these characters, who view their surrogate dad (voied by Jackie Chan) with a mixture of love and embarrassment, and who want to be accepted by a world predisposed to finding them monstrous. Naturally, becoming crime-fighting heroes is their best method for winning over the public, with a young and aspiring journalist April O’Neil (The Bear‘s Ayo Edebiri) hoping to improve her own social standing at school by breaking the existence of these unknown mutants. The comedy is robust and layered while allowing for nice character details and moments, giving each turtle their own satisfying arc. The action is fun and inventively staged while still being thematically relevant. The vocal cast is great, and the young actors are tremendous together, sparking an enviable improvisational energy that made me smile constantly. The art style has an intentional messiness to it, like smeared colored pencil drawings, and the imperfections are themselves part of the vast visual appeal. It’s a family movie that will succeed with old fans and new, and Mutant Mayhem is the best film depiction yet of the famous heroes in a half-shell.
Nate’s Grade: B+
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Guardians of the Galaxy vol. 3 (2023)
It’s taken me longer to review the third, and reportedly final, installment of the Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy because I didn’t think that I nor my family had the emotional bandwidth when the movie was originally released to herald the summer. I’ve been a big fan of writer/director James Gunn’s comic book escapade efforts with the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), as well as his first DC entry, 2021’s The Suicide Squad, the best DC film of the new era, so I’ve been highly anticipating a third Gaurdians ever since the second ended six years ago. Of course all fans have had to wait a little longer after Disney fired Gunn in 2019 for offensive social media posts they already knew about before the first Guardians film in 2014, and then they came to their senses and re-hired one of the most unique voices working within their giant sandbox of superheroes. The reason I decided to wait even longer is because I had been warned by many of my critical colleagues about the heavy thematic nature of the third entry, namely the frequent sequences of animal abuse. My family had to put down their household dog of over ten years in late April, and having to re-open that wound by watching pretend animals get abused was not the best for any of our emotional states. And so I waited until it was available on digital and in the comfortable sanctity of my home, and I alone in my family watched Volume Three, partly as a harbinger of future warning over what scenes to skip over for them. It’s a fitting end to a strange and funky series of movies that taught us to feel real emotions over racoons and trees, and even though I’d rate this as last in its respective Guardians standing, it’s still a winner and a topical reminder that these big-budget blockbusters are only ever as good as when the passion is evident.
The Guardians are on a mission to save their friend, Rocket (voiced by Bradley Cooper). He’s been incapacitated and is sought after by his creator, The High Evolutionary (Chukwudi Iwuji), a maniacal man with a god complex who is trying to create a perfect life form. This forces the Guardians to learn more about Rocket’s tragic past as a cruel science experiment, and it brings back Gomorrah (Zoe Saldana), though she’s not the same woman who fell in love with Peter Quill (Christ Pratt), and he’s having a hard time reconciling the different green girls. They’ll have to work together to rescue Rocket and stop the High Evolutionary from further harm.
This is a movie built around the back-story and emotional connections of Rocket, a character that, prior to Gunn’s first film, had fewer than a dozen comic appearances but has had an outsized influence over the movies. If the first movie was about the formation of our team, and the second was deepening the supporting characters, as well as exploring Quill’s daddy issues, then the last movie is all about how we say goodbye to the ones we love. Volume Three is clearly structured like Gunn’s fond farewell for these characters rather than merely a pause in their contractually obligated appearances (whether Marvel overrules Gunn is another matter). It makes the interaction more meaningful and also more emotionally rich, not just because certain characters might perish, but because of the journey we’ve been privileged to hop along for, how far they’ve come and how much they matter to others, and by extension us, the audience.
Case in point: the emotional evolution of Rocket Racoon. He began as a surly visual joke, a teeny mammal with a big gun and a big attitude. It wasn’t until a drunken outburst in Volume One that you got a glimpse of the trauma and pain beneath that antisocial demeanor. With Volume Three, he gets sidelined pretty early, which means the majority of the time we spend with Rocket is through a series of flashbacks with baby Rocket and his cute pals, all ongoing science experiments (one needs only to recognize the absence of these childhood friends as grown-ups to anticipate where this is inevitably heading). In some ways, it is cheap and manipulative. It’s not hard to make an audience feel extreme emotions by introducing a slew of adorable animals as well as a villain who hurts them and sees them as expendable experiments undeserving of sympathy. I wish Gunn hadn’t gone so hard in this direction because it feels excessive in the ideas that the film bluntly communicates. Yes, a storyteller will need time to establish a baseline of relationships, conflicts, and looming change, but do we need six or seven flashbacks to settle the concept of animal testing and animal cruelty being a bad thing? I credit Gunn with making his thematic intent unambiguous; this is wrong, and you will feel it explicitly. However, sidelining Rocket for a majority of the movie and having characters project onto his unconscious body, while providing more insight through a system of excessive and heavy-handed flashbacks, might not be the best model for ensuring this character gets his due when it comes to this showcase. Quill keeps calling Rocket his “best friend” and I’m trying to remember when this happened. I re-watched Volume Two this summer, and now consider it the best of the trilogy, and I cannot recall the specific events that bonded these two bickering alphas into inter-species BFFs.
Another facet of Gunn’s relevant themes is personified in the romantic realizations of Quill. Not to get too complicated, the current Gomorrah is a past version of herself and not the one who joined the Guardians, fell in love with Quill, and died in Infinity War. She’s back, but from her perspective she never left, and this moon-eyed dolt keeps projecting his feelings onto her. I respect that Gunn doesn’t try and wave away this complication, nor does he mitigate the agency and importance of this Gomorrah not having to follow the same path as her predecessor. The easy thing would have been for Quill to wait and for this new/old Gamorrah to see the same qualities that made the old/dead Gomorrah fall in love. It would be like one of those soapy romances where a person suffers amnesia and gets to fall in love with their spouse all over again. Gunn doesn’t do that. These are different people, and despite the aching desire of Quill to rekindle what he had, it has been lost, and this needs to be acknowledged and accepted. “I bet we were fun,” she says, and it’s a bittersweet summation that extends beyond the Guardians.
There is still Gunn’s signature sense of style and humor while checking the boxes of a big-screen action blockbuster. There’s an infiltration set piece that plays like a goofier Mission: Impossible setup but in a squishy bio-mechanical facility that reminded me of the eccentric and schlocky sci-fi diversions personified in the Lexx movies and TV series. There’s an entire planet of animal-human hybrids that feels wasted as further proof of the High Evolutionary’s already established evil. The entire character of Adam Warlock (a beefed up Will Poulter) is a himbo that definitely feels lacking in larger purpose now that the Infinity Era is over. There is one signature action scene involving a protracted fight through a crowded hallway, and it’s exciting and fun. The jokes are mostly contained to sardonic banter, which can be hilarious depending upon the combination of characters, though it also can be grating when it feels forced, like Mantis (Pom Klementieff) and Nebula (Karen Gillan) butting heads. The celebrated dad rock soundtrack has moved onto 90s and early 2000s music, and as a 90s kid, it gave me a personal nostalgic lift watching scenes jamming to dreamy whoo-hoo alt-rock acts like Radiohead and Spacehog and The Flaming Lips.
This also might be the grossest MCU movie yet, and not just from the animal abuse but a face-peeling scene that will startle most. I had to pause the screen and drag my 12-year-old stepdaughter into the room with the promise, “Want to see the grossest thing ever in a Marvel movie?” She agreed that it was indeed that. It’s reassuring that no matter the budget, Gunn’s sensibilities that make him the unique storyteller he is, the same man who began with Troma, will be there. Though this point also concerns several of my friends wondering if Gunn can abandon these silly and schlocky tendencies to tell an earnest and tonally appropriate tale for his 2025 Superman reboot.
Guardians of the Galaxy volume 3 is the end of an era for Gunn and for the MCU. As the new head of the DC film and TV universe, it’s unlikely he’ll be lending his talents to Marvel any time soon, although the characters he made us fall in love with could carry on. Gunn clearly loves these characters, and especially identifies with Rocket, the angry malcontent lashing out in pain, so it’s fitting to give this character the big stage for a final outing, and if he can throw in some animal cruelty messaging along with silly humor and pathos, then so be it. This practically feels like Marvel is giving Gunn even more leeway as an apology for firing him. The Guardians trilogy stands out from the prolific MCU assembly because of how much Gunn has personalized these movies to make them special. They have permission to be weird, to be heartfelt, and to be reflections of their idiosyncratic creator, a much more benevolent force than the High Evolutionary. Perhaps there’s even a parallel to be drawn there, a filmmaker trying to endlessly tinker with their creation in the futile pursuit of perfecting it whereas the imperfections and rough edges are often the lasting appeal of a movie. I don’t know if the MCU will contain a series quite like this again, and that adds to the feeling of this serving as a farewell. It was a fun, messy, ridiculous ride, and it was all Gunn.
Nate’s Grade: B
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The Super Mario Bros. Movie (2023)
Colorful and eminently pleasant, The Super Mario Bros. Movie is about everything you would expect from an Illumination project. To begin with, there’s not a lot of story in the 30-plus years of Mario video games, so it’s not surprising that the story is kept relatively familiar with characters each inhabiting simple motivation (Mario wants to impress his dad, Luigi wants to be brave, Peach wants to protect her people, Bowser wants to be accepted by his unrequited love). Much of the movie is establishing a new location and giving some moment of fan service before moving on, like an extensive Mario Kart Rainbow Road sequence or Mario meeting Donkey Kong. It feels like the risk-averse creative process started with a list of characters, levels, and references and then how to squeeze them in. This is a movie kept at a kiddie level, which is fine even for adults to enjoy, but it means there is a lowered ceiling of ambition (so… many…. needle-drop song selections…). Much of the movie is fleeting and fine, with highlights including Jack Black’s performance as the love-struck Bowser, the training sequences making use of the bizarre physics and accoutrements of the Mushroom Kingdom, and a delightfully nihilistic little blue star with a cheery child’s voice. The movie is earnest to the point of being a little corny, which might be refreshing for parents and children used to a recent slate of overly glib kid’s movies trying to act smarter than they are. This movie is cute and harmless and a sugar rush to be forgotten after it wears off. Now re-watch the 1993 version that attempted to take the same source material and make a parallel world Blade Runner with Dennis Hopper as King Koopa. There’s also one hundred percent less Chris Pratt.
Nate’s Grade: B-
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