Producers: Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, Dani Bernfeld and Luciana Damon   Director: Joe Carnahan   Screenplay: Joe Carnahan   Cast: Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Steven Yeun, Teyana Taylor, Sasha Calle, Catalina Sandino Moreno, Scott Adkins, Kyle Chandler, Néstor Carbonell, Jose Pablo Cantillo, Lina Esco, Cliff Chamberlain, Alex Hernandez and Daisuke Tsuji   Distributor: Netflix

Grade: C-

Like so many Hollywood action movies, “The Rip” is full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.  Except for a stellar but indifferently used cast, Joe Carnahan’s movie is a totally undistinguished specimen of a tired genre.

It begins with the assassination of Captain Jackie Velez (Lina Esco), the head of the Miami PD’s Tactical Narcotics Team, by a couple of masked gunmen after a car chase.  But she manages to get off a phone message before expiring.  Her death is especially disturbing for one member of the TNT, Sergeant JD Byrne (Ben Affleck) who, it turns out, had been romantically involved with her.

As the tragedy sinks in, Velez’s deputy, Lieutenant Dane Dumars (Matt Damon), announces that he’s gotten a tip about a house in Hialeah being used to store drug money and takes the team—including Byrne, Mike Ro (Steven Yeun), Numa Baptiste (Teyana Taylor) and Lolo Salazar (Catalina Sandino Moreno) to the address.  Its sole occupant is Desi Molina (Sasha Calle), who recently inherited the place from her deceased grandfather.

The cops find a stash of cash in the otherwise suspiciously empty attic, and Dumars sets the team to work protecting the premises while counting the money.  He’s apparently concerned, given rumors circulating about crooked police keeping cash they seize in drug houses, that informing their superiors could lead to trouble.  But Byrne suspects that he might be planning to steal the money himself, and manages to tell DEA agent Matty Nix (Kyle Chandler) what’s going on. 

Meanwhile the team receives threatening calls, which they assume are coming from the cartel that controls the neighborhood.  Then the house is rocked by gunfire from outside, and though the attackers are driven off, Salazar is wounded.  Byrne arranges a call from a cartel leader denying that his group was responsible and giving up the cash while suggesting that Velez’s murder was an inside job.  The growing schism in the team is interrupted by the arrival of Nix, who takes Dumars, Byrne and Ro in his armored car while leaving Baptiste and Salazar to guard Molina.  It’s during the ride back to the city that revelations occur about widespread corruption and the reason behind Velez’s murder.  More gunplay and car chases occur after Byrne’s brother Del (Scott Adkins), an FBI agent, shows up; a sappy sunrise valediction to Velez’s memory on a beach closes things.

The twists Carnahan contrives in the last act are apparently intended to be clever but are actually rather limp, and the script’s back-and-forth structure, alternating dull dialogue sequences—filled with ostensibly tough-guy lingo in which every second sentence features a string of F-bombs—with gun battles and vehicular mayhem makes for an enervating brew.  He, editor Kevin Hale and the stunt crew handle the action moments decently but without any special imagination, and neither the grubby production design (Judy Becker) nor the murky cinematography (Juan Miguel Azpiroz) is especially appetizing.  Clinton Shorter contributes one of those dreary scores consisting of droning subterranean moans punctuated by frantic action beats.

What might have possessed Affleck and Damon to choose such familiar material is unclear.  Maybe it was the chance to sleepwalk their way through the movie, or grab big paychecks, or just to sport unattractive facial hair.  In any case, their performances are unexceptional; any number of journeymen actors could have done equally well in these roles.  The rest of the cast are equally unremarkable in parts that might have been AI-generated.

It’s disheartening to think that this mediocre piece is likely, given its Netflix release, to have a far greater viewership than the last action Damon and Affleck did together, Ridley Scott’s 2021 medieval opus “The Last Duel,” which bombed although it was a far more intelligent and compelling picture than this one.

Producers: Marc Platt and David Stone   Director: Jon M. Chu   Screenplay: Winnie Holzman and Dana Fox   Cast: Cynthia Erivo, Ariana Grande, Jonathan Bailey, Ethan Slater, Bowen Yang, Marissa Bode, Michelle Yeoh, Jeff Goldblum, Bronwyn James, Sharon D. Clarke and Colman Domingo   Distributor: Universal Pictures

Grade: C-

“Second Act Trouble” is a common term in the Broadway lexicon; Steven Suskin even used it as the title of his 2006 book.  It focused on flop musicals, but successful ones have suffered from the phenomenon too, and despite its astonishing success, which has raised it to the level of a cultural icon, “Wicked” is a perfect example: even some of its most rabid devotees will admit that the second act isn’t the equal of the first.

Director John Chu apparently recognized that, and so in refashioning the hit show for the screen, he employed Dana Fox and composer Stephen Schwartz to beef up the second half of his two-picture concept by expanding the narrative to iron out the jerkiness in Winnie Holtzman’s original libretto and adding a couple of new songs, “No Place Like Home” and “The Girl in the Bubble,” to the largely unremarkable score.  The result is that “For Good,” as the completion is titled after its supposedly show-stopping closing duet, runs for well over two hours rather than the single hour of the original stage version.

But the tinkering really doesn’t mark much of an improvement; in fact, in some ways it exacerbates the weaknesses.  The plot is still jerky, with character motivations jumping back and forth so abruptly that you might suffer from whiplash trying to understand them.  The new songs are at best ordinary.  And the tone of the movie is dark and gloomy, despite the basic emphasis on the bond of sisterly friendship that can survive despite stresses and strains—the theme that has struck a chord with (especially female) audiences over the past two decades. 

By comparison to last year’s predecessor, which was brassy and eye-poppingly garish, this sequel vacillates between gaudily overdone bright sequences built around Glinda (Ariana Grande) and brooding, depressing ones centered on Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo).  The visual contrasts in Nathan Crowley’s production design, Paul Tazewell’s costumes and Alice Brooks’s cinematography are striking, but not in a good way.       

One shouldn’t blame the filmmakers too much, of course.  The fault really lies with the source material.  Novelist Gregory Maguire, on whose 1995 book the musical was based, never successfully integrated his revisionist take into L. Frank Baum’s original stories or the 1939 film based on them, and seeing his attempt turned into action merely accentuates its weaknesses.  The first half of “Wicked” on screen was mediocre; the second is equally bad, just in different ways.        

To recap: Elphaba has escaped villainous Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh), the evil power behind the weak Wizard (Jeff Goldblum).  She continues her fight on behalf of Oz’s animals and, in an escalation of discriminatory policies, the Munchkins, whose land is now governed by Elphaba’s bitter, wheelchair-bound sister Nessarose (Marissa Bode), who rigorously enforces the cruel rules despite her love for her servant Bog (Ethan Slater), a Munchkin himself. (The preachiness is as heavy-handed as in the last film.)  For her part Morrible uses fear and hatred to turn Elphaba into the Wicked Witch of the West in the public mind.

Her chief instrument in this is Glinda, the magic-free beauty who’s presented as the beacon of purity and good in contrast to her former friend Elphaba.  Glinda is also affianced to Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey), who is also now the Captain of the Wizard’s horsemen despite his residual love for Elphaba, which will become a major turning point.

Then there are the Baum characters—Dorothy, the Tin Man, the Cowardly Lion—who are inserted into the plot, as well as the tornado that brings the Kansas farmgirl to Oz by Morrible’s machinations.  (One of the more ludicrous elements of Chu’s staging is always to show Dorothy without revealing her face—a tactic some films about Christ used to avoid being labeled as sacrilegious.)  The three are treated as pawns in Morrible’s schemes, and portrayed in rather nasty terms (especially the Tin Man, whose creation is presented in an especially disquieting way, though not as unsettling as the montage that depicts the formation of The Scarecrow).

The crux of the plot is how Glinda overcomes her vanity and ambition to embrace true, rather than false, goodness and embrace her old friendship with Elphaba, and how Elphaba’s dream of ending discrimination in Oz is achieved, though not without sacrifice.  That would be fine if the twists and turns of plot and character motivation weren’t so bizarrely quick (even the flying monkeys change from threat to ally in the blink of an eye) and the explanations about what transpires weren’t so ludicrous.  (That involving Elphaba’s escape from a watery death is a bit of claptrap that on stage is absurd, and on film more so.  It’s also badly shot by Chu, Brooks and effects supervisor Pablo Helman.)  And the “happy ending” for Elphaba and Fiyero in fact looks awfully bleak.  As to the great mass of Ozites, at the end they look to be the same band of grinning, colorfully dressed nonentities who do nothing all day but wait to ooh and ahh over whatever outlandish display whoever’s in power deigns to favor them with as they always were; in spite of the glitz, the Emerald City feels like a very boring place.

Of course, none of this will matter a whit to devotees of the show, who will savor every moment of this elephantine extravaganza.  And in truth there are some redeeming factors.  Erivo and Grande—particularly the latter this time around—wring everything they can out of their storied characters, and though the songs they sing are second-rate, they give them their all—which is considerable.  Goldblum brings his patented sense of whimsy to the Wizard, and his big number, “Wonderful,” has a bit of the Great White Way panache that’s sadly lacking elsewhere; it also benefits from the work of the effects team, which has also conjured up lots of CGI critters, many of the Disney-cute variety.  (Sharon D. Clarke returns to voice Dulcibear, nicely, but Colman Domingo is wasted as the Cowardly Lion.)  John Powell’s underscore is fine, and editor Myron Kerstein tries to keep things moving, if not always successfully.

But the rest of the cast offers little.  Yeoh and Bode are dull and Slater, on the other end of the spectrum, hammy.  Bailey is a blandly handsome hero (though anyone would have trouble with his character’s sudden switcheroos).  And while Bowen Yang and Bronwyn James return as Pfannee and ShenShen, now Glinda’s aides, they have so little to do that they’re in the blink-and-you’ll-miss-them category.  For a musical, the dancing is minimal, especially for the principals; and in the ensemble numbers Christopher Scott’s choreography is again busy but robotic.       

“Wicked” was a big hit, and “For Good” will doubtlessly be so as well. But one hopes that future composers and filmmakers will resist the temptation to seek inspiration from the myriad continuations Maguire has added to his first novel in what’s become a long series. That yellow brick road is not an inviting route.