'Oz The Great And Powerful' Review: One Too Many Witches, One Too Many Love Triangles

Wizard of Oz prequel ‘Oz the Great and Powerful’ has one too many witches for its own good.

There’s actually a great deal more magic and a great deal more heart in Oz the Great and Powerful than I expected. This story of a con-man carnival magician and his unlikely band of accomplices out to save the land of Oz had many pleasant surprises, but none more so than the way it managed to bring a smile to my face.

I’ll be honest: I was expecting another Alice in Wonderland disappointment. Fortunately, where Tim Burton failed to create characters I could care about in his adaptation of Alice, Sam Raimi’s Oz prequel is another story altogether. The porcelain girl, the flying monkey bellhop, the munchkin herald—these are no replacements for the Scarecrow or the Tin Man, but they’re still a lovable bunch.

The problem with Oz is neither its wizard—I’m no tremendous fan of James Franco, but he holds his own—nor the supporting cast. In fact, while the film is often more spectacle than substance, even its use of CGI and 3D were mostly tasteful, with some of the best use of 3D effects I’ve seen since Avatar.

Which Witch is Which?

No, the real problem with Oz the Great and Powerful is that it has one too many witches. Three may seem a natural number when it comes to witches, of course. Think Macbeth, or the Graeae of Greek myth, or Orddu, Orwen and Orgoch of Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain fiction. Three is a good number when it comes to witches, three times out of four. Just not, it turns out, in this particular movie.

In Oz the Great and Powerful we have Theodora, Evanora, and Glinda. Theodora (Mila Kunis) is a young, naive thing, susceptible to love, bouts of fury, and her sister’s manipulations. She falls instantly and unconvincingly in love with the wizard, Oz, who also happens to be a terrible rake and lady’s man.

Then there’s Evanora, Theodora’s older sister. Evanora (Rachel Weisz) is the manipulator, the real wicked witch, and—as far as I’m concerned—easily the best character in the whole film. Weisz plays the villain convincingly, with enough menace and restraint to pull it off.

Finally, there’s Glinda the Good, replete with her flying bubbles. Glinda (Michelle Williams) is first encountered, for reasons not entirely clear, in a dark and spooky graveyard at the back end of the dark forest. Evanora has sent Oz and co. to kill her, claiming she’s the wicked witch responsible for the death of the old king.

So we have our witches three, and here is where things go sour. Glinda is an entirely unremarkable character, but I can forgive that. In the wider plot, we can afford a bland princess-witch. It’s Theodora, and Mila Kunis, and the oh-so-very forced writing and plot devices that bulwark her motivations that are the real Achilles Heel of Oz.

Great and Powerful Love Triangle of Oz

You see, Theodora not only falls extremely quickly for Oz, she turns against him the moment she feels at all spurned. We’re to believe that it’s Evanora’s doing that turns her love to a burning, hate-filled rage, but it’s not even the tiniest bit convincing. One cursed apple later, and she’s become a green hag with a penchant for maniacal cackling. And no, that’s not the tiniest bit convincing either.

I was actually really enjoying the film right up until this moment. I enjoyed that Oz was such a fraud. I liked that we began in Kansas, in black and white, that we rode the hot-air balloon to the colorful land of Oz. I liked the visuals there, the humor, the beginnings of some character development. And then suddenly, horribly, we’re asked to swallow this great big heaping spoonful of implausibility.

Mila Kunis doesn’t pull it off.

She’s not wicked enough to be the Wicked Witch, and she moves too quickly from innocent and heartbroken to vengeful and insane.

We can blame magic, but even in a movie about magic, blaming it’s still a cop-out. And that’s what this really feels like: a cop-out on the part of the people tasked with telling this story. I can’t even fault Kunis too much, because she had to work with a character whose motivations were paper thin in a love-triangle-gone-bad romance that is at once preposterous and trite. It’s all a huge distraction from what could have been, and should have been, a terrific adventure.

Meanwhile, at every turn, Theodora is upstaged by her sister Evanora. This is true of Kunis as well, who simply pales in comparison to Rachel Weisz’s wicked performance. It doesn’t take long to realize that this film has one too many witches, one too many villains, and one too many leading ladies.

In the end, the conflict is diluted both by the contrived romance and falling out, and by the fact that the Wicked Witch of the West, in all her bad green make-up, is a really disappointing villain standing awkwardly in the shadow of her big sister.

The witch we’ve feared since childhood, since 1939 for that matter, is transformed into a petty scorned lover with a bad laugh. Her green face is only frightening because of how silly it looks. Her broom is no longer a trapping of her wicked witchiness, it’s a one-liner directed at her boyfriend of…well, one whole day.

Not Wicked Enough, Not Oz

What could have been a wonderful romp through Oz, pitting our heroes (and our not-so-heroic carnival magician) against one very evil Evanora, ends up as a soap opera, and not a very good one.

The film’s final act—a con job that segues brilliantly into The Wizard of Oz—can only be enjoyed half as much as we’d like. All that disappointment from Act 2 carries right on over, and I for one was still too annoyed by what came previously to enjoy myself as much as I would have liked.

Perhaps a part of me was simply expecting too much. Some years ago I read the book Wicked, and have since seen its musical adaptation. The musical is fantastic, but the book is much better still.

While Oz tells the origin story of the wizard, Wicked tells the origin story of the wicked witch. It’s a much more compelling story with a far more intriguing protagonist in Elphaba (the Wicked Witch.) While Wicked is in many ways a subversion of the Oz tales, it still felt truer to the spirit of those books than Oz the Great and Powerful.

Maybe it’s a little unfair to compare the two, but it’s also inevitable, much as it’s inevitable that we’ll compare this one to the classic.

While Oz is a fun movie for the most part, it’s not going to stick with me. It’s not a movie I’ll likely care to see again, nor a classic filled with classic characters that will stick in my memory like old friends. I’m certainly glad I saw it on the big screen, and I think it’s an enjoyable enough film for kids and parents alike.

But it has one witch too many, and a script that’s arrogant enough to makeOz about love triangles rather than tap into the adventurous spirit of L. Frank Baum’s many books. It does so inexplicably, heedless of how badly this damages one of our most beloved big-screen villains in the process.

With all the great source material Raimi and screenwriters Mitchell Kapner and David Lindsay-Abaire had to work with, there’s really no excuse.

Sadly, however harsh this review may seem, I probably enjoyed more of the film than not. I had a grin on my face a great deal of the time. It’s this realization, that here was a film I could almost really love—but not quite—that let me down the most.
Collected from :http://www.forbes.com