Directed by: Sam Raimi
Starring: James Franco, Michelle Williams, Rachel Weisz, Mila Kunis
Rated PG, 130 minutes
The opening credit sequence of “Oz the Great and Powerful” is a wonderfully whimsical animated bit that sets us up for an imaginative and fun movie experience. The following two hours represent one of the most miserable failures to create “movie magic” I’ve seen since I began writing reviews. I don’t know what’s to blame – the incompleteness of the world of Oz, the script’s unbearable melodrama, an assortment of grotesquely bad performances, a painful lack of subtlety, a message so stupid it’s nauseating, or God knows what else. To put it in simpler terms, halfway through “Oz” I found myself mouthing out the words “Please gouge out my eyes.”
This glossy homage to “The Wizard of Oz” presents the backstory of the great Wizard himself, a magician in a traveling circus, Oscar Diggs (James Franco, “127 Hours”). Oscar, or Oz, as others call him, is a sham and a womanizer and he knows it. He desires to be great, but lacks the wherewithal and, frankly, the talent to become so. But when a tornado sweeps him away to the magical land of Oz, he finds himself surrounded by those who believe him to be the great wizard he wants dearly to be.
There is Theodora (Mila Kunis, “Black Swan”), a gullible witch who wants Oz to bring peace to the Emerald City. And there is her sister, Evanora (Rachel Weisz, “The Constant Gardener”), the royal adviser. According to the sisters, a prophecy predicted Oz’s arrival and subsequent ascension to the throne of the deceased king, but first Oz must destroy the wicked witch who lives in the Dark Forest. Seeing the chance to prove himself to be a great wizard, Oz goes to fulfill the sisters’ quest. But instead of a wicked witch, he finds Glinda the Good (Michelle Williams, “My Week With Marilyn”), who reveals that Theodora and Evanora are not what they seem. Now knowing which witches are actually evil, they must return to Emerald City and take it back for the people of Oz.
None of which sounds terrible – campy and stupid, perhaps, but not fatal. But a melodramatic script handled poorly by both director and cast doom this movie to such abysmal depths as a thesaurus can hardly capture. To start with, we are subjected to inconsistent special effects, to which the movie hopelessly clings. Then you add bits, gags, and scenarios that have been seen before, and executed better, in movies ranging from “Annie Hall” to “The Three Amigos!” to “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2” to, of course, the original “Wizard of Oz.”
Sam Raimi (“Spider-Man”) then tries to inject a couple stylistic old-Hollywood throwbacks into the film, but they are less an homage and more a daft assumption that the audience will mistake the bad writing, shot composure, and acting for an imitation of classic cinema. And despite all the connections to the 1939 classic, “Oz” fails to adequately or satisfactorily set up the loose ends that Dorothy and Co. tie up.
But wait, you say, sometimes a terrible movie can be saved somewhat by actors who are at least having fun, or who are aware of the movie’s campiness. Not so here, unfortunately. James Franco is a less-than-charming lead, Rachel Weisz is a dull-as-chalk villain, and Michelle Williams, though sweet, is a boring Glinda. Mila Kunis, painfully bad as Theodora, takes the cake, looking more like a bad middle school rendition of the Wicked Witch than the actress who managed to hold her own against Natalie Portman in “Black Swan.” An appearance by Zach Braff (TV’s “Scrubs”) is cute, but not even close to enough to save this movie.
Now, when I see bad movies, I remind myself that a lot of hard work and effort went into them, and that releasing a finished product is a tremendous feat. Any critic who lambasts a film is, by necessity, trivializing the labor that produced it. But “Oz the Great and Powerful” makes it very, very hard to remind myself of this, and I hate that more than anything. Because it is so bad, and so woefully mistaken about its greatness or power, that I am having infinitely more fun tearing it apart in this review than I had watching it. As a moviegoer, I feel defeated. The curmudgeonly traditionalists who claim modern Hollywood has killed the art form are surely having a field day.
Originally published in The Harvard Press on 3/15/13.