One of the movie industry's many recent laments is that 2024 has given us no Barbenheimer -- no box-office showdown between two thrillingly brainy blockbusters, cemented together in the cultural imagination and in the commercial stratosphere. And yet, just in time for Thanksgiving, here come two wishfully galumphing epics, "Wicked" and "Gladiator II." One is a revisionist fantasy of Oz, the other a revisionist history of Rome, and both are chockablock with political conspiracies, authoritarian abuses, and foul-tempered monkeys, none of which adds up to a full-blown phenomenon. If "Barbie" and "Oppenheimer" struck blows for risk and originality in Hollywood, the slickly refurbished wares of "Wadiator" -- or, if you prefer, "Glicked" -- suggest a safe retreat to known quantities. Choose your own adventure, but, whether it leads to the Colosseum or to the Emerald City, you've surely been there before.
In "Wicked" -- or, as it appears onscreen, "Wicked: Part I" -- that familiarity is entirely the point. The movie, directed by Jon M. Chu with some of the whirligig showmanship he brought to "In the Heights" (2021) and "Crazy Rich Asians" (2018), kicks off a two-part adaptation of a hit Broadway musical, which was itself loosely based on Gregory Maguire's 1995 novel, "Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West." All yellow brick roads lead back to L. Frank Baum's "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz," though the classic 1939 film adaptation exerts the mightiest influence, having immortalized the Wicked Witch as a green-skinned, broomstick-riding cackler -- played by Margaret Hamilton, in one of the most primally terrifying movie-villain performances.
Evil this delectable can no longer be simply savored; it must be deconstructed, and lucratively prequelized, in the manner of sympathetic villain origin stories like "Maleficent," "Joker," and "Cruella." It makes sense that "Wicked," a forerunner of this trend on the page and the stage, has now found its place on the screen, where the story can shoulder its full weight in cinematic Baumbast. And so the real Wicked Witch steps out from behind the curtain -- and, lo, she is Elphaba Thropp (Cynthia Erivo), an intellectually gifted, morally courageous, and grievously misunderstood outcast, whose only crime is having been born with a complexion of chlorophyll.
Much of "Part I," scripted by Winnie Holzman (who wrote the book for the musical) and Dana Fox, unfolds at the ill-named Shiz University -- Hogwarts with Munchkins -- where Elphaba arrives as a caregiver for her newly enrolled sister, Nessarose (Marissa Bode), who has a disability. But Elphaba's irrepressible talents catch the attention of the school's headmistress, Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh), prompting a rivalry with Galinda (Ariana Grande, billed as Ariana Grande-Butera), a shallow, self-absorbed classmate who will eventually become Glinda, the Good Witch of the North. Elphaba and Galinda are forced to be roommates, and they go together like asparagus and bubble gum. But Galinda is more than just a walking dumb-blonde joke: she's the secret seriocomic weapon of "Wicked," and Grande balances her delightful queen-bee insouciance with a porcelain vulnerability worthy of Baum's own China Princess. Beneath every exaggerated hair toss, she unleashes a poignant frisson of panic.
When the two witches finally set their differences aside (cue "Popular," the deftest and funniest of Stephen Schwartz's songs), Galinda's joy is unfeigned; her friendship with "Elphie" fills a real void. Erivo makes you believe it. Her coolly magnetic stare is her onscreen superpower, and here it serves to modulate the narrative clutter swirling around her. As a fastidiously retconned "Wizard of Oz" prequel, "Wicked" has its puzzle-box pleasures: the uninitiated can muse over the narrative significance of, say, a terrified lion cub, a bicycle basket, or a hunky prince (an assured Jonathan Bailey) who foretells his future with the lyric "Life is painless / for the brainless." As a parable of political radicalization, however, the movie soon turns lumbering and obvious. Oz is in the grip of creeping totalitarianism, and the more Elphaba grasps the stakes, the more pointed the hats she has to wear become: she's a feminist crusader, an animal-welfare activist, and, in time, a full-blown resistance leader, with the not so wonderful Wizard of Oz (a well-cast Jeff Goldblum) as her target.
Given the story's insistence on not judging a witch by her color, is it churlish to say that I wish "Wicked: Part I" looked better? (And also that, at two hours and forty minutes, there were less of it to look at?) The visual bar here is admittedly high; no new movie can be expected to match the dazzling Technicolor brilliance of "The Wizard of Oz," a picture I've seen so many times that even its flaws feel like old friends: the lopped-off lines, the mismatched edits, the shot in which Hamilton's Witch, about to vanish in a poof of smoke, misses her mark by a second or two. These imperfections, far from diminishing the experience, give the older film a material weight, a conviction about its own magic, for which the pristine digital surfaces of "Wicked" can conjure no equivalent. It's not easy being green screen, but, even so, there is little in this movie's muted palette and washed-out backlighting to make you muse, even for a second, "What a world, what a world."
Near the end, though, "Wicked" does surge to a kind of life. The climax is protracted but darkly thrilling: ugly secrets spill into the open, winged monkeys screech and scatter, and Elphaba comes into full possession of her powers. "It's time to try defying gravity," she belts to the skies, and the film shrewdly follows suit, with a vertiginous airborne number that doesn't just feel like Oz -- it feels like Vegas. You'd want to see it projected onto the Sphere, perhaps with Elphaba soaring on a rhinestone-studded broomstick and then leaving the MGM Grand -- sorry, the Emerald City -- in the dust. "Part II" looms next year; until then, Elphie has left the building.
The lesson of "Wicked," should you happen to miss it, is that the appearance of villainy can be deceiving. "Gladiator II," in its own punchy, stabby, neck-chomping way, upholds the same principle. Directed by Ridley Scott, nearly a quarter century after he steered the first "Gladiator" (2000) to smash returns and Oscar glory, this is the sword-and-sandal epic as both sequel and shell game. Clean good-vs.-evil demarcations are a thing of the past, and motives and alliances can be murderously tricky to suss out. The hero, at least, is no mystery: he is Lucius (Paul Mescal), a fierce young warrior of Numidia, who, after experiencing crushing defeat and tragic personal loss, is hauled off to Rome as a prisoner of war. Soon he will be a gladiator in the Colosseum, where a bloody quest for vengeance begins.
But vengeance against whom? Is his enemy Marcus Acacius (Pedro Pascal), the general who inflicted his particular agony -- or do Pascal's soft eyes and grave sighs signal us to look elsewhere? Perhaps Lucius should blame the emperors Geta (Joseph Quinn) and Caracalla (Fred Hechinger), monstrous twin tyrants who have sent the empire spiralling into decadence. And what of Macrinus (Denzel Washington), a wily slaveowner who casts Lucius into the arena, recognizing a total killer when he sees one? What's his long game?
After a while, it barely seems to matter, and "Gladiator II," following a propulsive opening stretch, recedes into the long shadow of its predecessor. If the first "Gladiator" still retains much of its visceral and emotional force, that's because it serves us our revenge-thriller poison straight; to see the mighty general Maximus (Russell Crowe) smack down the unambiguously loathsome emperor Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix) remains an irreducible pleasure. As "Gladiator II" opens, Maximus has been dead for sixteen years, and, though his fighting spirit becomes a guiding light of sorts for Lucius, their bond never feels more than circumstantial. The lead role is a stretch for Mescal, but a good one. After the art-house melancholy of "All of Us Strangers" and "Aftersun," he tears into Lucius's red-meat physicality with voracious fury, as if it were his first and possibly last meal; all the sadder, then, when that fury suddenly evaporates in the face of narrative expedience.
Even so, we are not not entertained. There is, for one, the invigorating if empty-calorie flash of Denzel Washington, who will play Othello on Broadway next year, and who might have seen, in the warrior-whisperer role of Macrinus, an opportunity to channel his inner Iago. The arena battles have an agreeably batshit, can-you-top-this conceptual absurdity; you won't soon forget a scene in which Lucius fends off a deranged baboon, or when the Colosseum is reconfigured into a kind of third-century Sea World, complete with snapping sharks. In planting us squarely in the splash zone, Scott and his collaborators pander so unabashedly to our bloodlust that it rings all the more hollow when "Gladiator II" suddenly fancies itself a civics lesson, entreating its characters to mourn their failing empire and dream of its glorious rebirth. We get it, we get it: there's no place like Rome. ♦
