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.

Producers: Simon Kinberg, Nira Park and Edgar Wright   Director: Edgar Wright   Screenplay: Michael Bacall and Edgar Wright Cast: Glen Powell, Josh Brolin, Colman Domingo, Michael Cera, Lee Pace, William H. Macy, Lee Pace, Michael Cera, Emilia Jones, Daniel Ezra, Angelo Gray, Jayme Lawson, Sean Hayes, Katy O’Brian, Martin Herlihy, Karl Glusman, David Zayas, Alex Neustaedter and George Carroll   Distributor: Paramount Pictures

Grade: C-

2025 seems an appropriate year for a remake of “The Running Man”—it was, after all, the chronological setting of the 1982 novel by Stephen King, published under his pseudonym of Richard Bachman.  (King once admitted to writing it over the space of a mere seventy-two hours, ad publishing it with virtually no changes.)   It might seem unfortunate that it’s appearing so soon after Francis Lawrence’s adaptation of another Bachman book, “The Long Walk,” the premise of which was quite similar (though its cruel game involved a slow trudge rather than a hectic chase); but since that movie proved no box office bonanza, it probably won’t matter.

This version by Edgar Wright and his co-writer Michael Bacall is much more faithful to the novel than Paul Michael Glaser’s 1987 movie, which was reworked substantially by scripter Steven E. de Souza to meet the expectations of fans of its star Arnold Schwarzenegger.  But fidelity is a relative term.  This “Man” follows the basic plotline of the book pretty closely, but it goes hog-wild with special effects (the sequence with Michael Cera as Elton Parrakis, the rebel who aids the hero, is expanded using them to excruciating excess), and of course it can’t abide the bleakness of the ending, instead adding a coda that assuages the present-day audience’s insistence that heroes survive, villains get what they deserve and good triumphs over evil.  As Wilde wisely observed, that is what fiction means.

To rehearse the plot: in a dystopian American of the (here unspecified) future, Ben Richards (Glen Powell) is fired from his job for daring to stand up for workers’ rights.  The loss of income is devastating: his wife Sheila (Jayme Lawson) is forced to take on unsavory work, and their little daughter can’t get the medicine she needs to stave off a potentially fatal form of flu.

So Ben decides to try out for a spot on one of the game shows designed by The Network to serve as palliatives for the miserable lower classes.  His anger issues make him a perfect candidate for the most violent and dangerous of the games, in which three contestants are, with the help of the public, chased down and terminated by Hunters, led by masked Evan McCone (Lee Pace).  But the longer they survive over the course of the thirty-day span, the more they earn, and if they manage to make it through the entire month (which, of course, no one ever has), they become billionaires.

Ben’s chosen by the program’s slimy creator Dan Killian (Josh Brolin) as one of the three contestants in the game’s upcoming iteration, introduced by the show’s flamboyant host Bobby T (Colman Domingo) to a raucous studio audience along with reckless Laughlin (Katy O’Brian) and goofy Jansky (Martin Herlihy).  After a stop to acquire forged papers and disguises from Molie (William H. Macy), he tries to hide under an assumed name in a New York hotel.  But his first identity is blown, and he’s off running, winding up at a slum Y in Boston.  He’s found again, escaping only in a fiery blast that the program—doctoring the messages he’s required to send on tape each day—portrays as an act of sadistic terrorism.  Meanwhile hapless Jansky bites the dust.

Fortunately, Ben gets help at this point from Stacey (Angelo Gray), a ghetto kid, and his older brother Bradley (Daniel Ezra), a rebel with connections to a wider network.  They help him escape the city (here in one of those reckless car chases in which they off a couple of pursuing hunters), and after further close calls—and learning that Laughlin has been terminated in a blaze of reckless glory—he finds himself at the home of Parrakis, the son of an honest cop destroyed by his corrupt colleagues, who’s gussied up the place with all manner of cool protective devices.  But they’re betrayed by his mother (Sandra Dickinson), here a ragged-haired old crone brainwashed by conspiracy-fueled TV coverage, and those devices aren’t enough.

In the aftermath of that effects-laden melee and another chase, Ben finds himself tracked down to a freeway by the ever-searching drones and takes Amelia Williams (Emilia Jones), a prosperous but dimwitted woman, hostage in her SUV.  She’s initially horrified, but is convinced about the program’s perfidy when she’s herself depicted falsely via AI manipulation, and accompanies her captor aboard a waiting plane along with McCone, unmasked at Killian’s orders.  This is the setting of the final act, in which Killian tries to seduce Richards into joining his team; after he refuses, the aircraft becomes the setting for a long, dragged-out fight with McCone and the flight crew that leaves Williams parachuting to the ground and Ben maneuvering the plane against Killian.

So much is amplified King.  But Wright and Bacall, knowing full well that the book’s close would never conform to today’s audience’s aversion to bleak endings, add their own coda which takes advantage of the novel’s image of the downtrodden masses turning in Richards’ favor to present him, via some inexplicable sleight of hand, into the leader of a revolution against a cruel system.  It’s a pandering close that King, though listed as an executive producer, could hardly have warmly embraced.

If the reworking of the material feels compromised by modern expectations in both style and narrative, the execution is also seriously flawed.  Though Wright manages to throw in some of the mordant humor for which he’s known (one can appreciate Ben’s reply, when pretending to be a priest, to a guy who asks if he’ll go to hell for using a condom), he mostly plays things according to the tentpole playbook, and gives his craft crew—production designer Marcus Rowland, costumer Julian Day and cinematographer Chung-hoon Chung—free rein to construct a vision of the future that somehow manages to be both dank and garish.  The special effects supervised by Andrew Whitehurst often come across as murky, especially toward the close, and the crowd scenes are suspiciously small-scaled.  Paul Machliss’ editing frequently seems rushed and slapdash, and Steve Price’s score generically bombastic.

As to the cast, Powell is at best adequate; he’s supposed to be an everyman thrown into situations he’s unequipped to deal with, of course, but he lacks the undefinable something that would overcome a faintly bland aura.  Brolin is even worse: his attempt at grinning villainy falls far short of what Richard Dawson brought to the Schwarzenegger version.  Cera adds more than a touch of mania to his character, and Ezra is a cooly unruffled underground leader, but no one else makes much of an impression.  Jones and Pace are nondescript, and even Macy offers little but generalized gruffness.

The upshot is that despite all the money and talent thrown into the mix, Wright’s “Running Man” turns out to be a pretty flatfooted affair.