Color me shocked (or rather, green): a Broadway adaptation that wasn’t half bad!

“Wicked” is based on the smash hit musical of the same name, and tells the origin story of Glinda the Good Witch (Ariana Grande) and Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West (Cynthia Ervio) before the events of “The Wizard of Oz.” Jonathan Bailey, Ethan Slater, Bowen Yang, Marissa Bode, Peter Dinklage, Michelle Yeoh, and Jeff Goldblum also star, as Jon M. Chu directs.

Adapting Broadway shows can be a tricky game. Sometimes it works (“Chicago,” “West Side Story”), sometimes it’s middling (“Les Mis,” “Jersey Boys”), and other times it results in an unmitigated disaster (“Cats,” “Mean Girls”). My experience with the world of Oz was limited to the 1939 classic, Sam Raimi’s 2013 prequel, and the 1925 silent film (don’t ask), and my only brush with “Wicked” was seeing the famous white/pink/green logos and Broadway bill from time to time. They announced plans for a film version of “Wicked” way back in 2009, but it languished in development hell for quite some time before finally landing on the current iteration in 2021. I was skeptical, in part because the film is only the first act of the show (a fact the studio has been fairly cagey about promoting), but the half of the story we do get is a fairly whimsical and (surprisingly) colorful time at the movies, with a shockingly fantastic performance from Ariana Grande.

I’ll just start with Grande, not only because she is by far the best part of the movie but because I owe her an apology for rolling my eyes in the weeks leading up to the film’s release when I saw tweets and posts about her giving an Oscar-level performance. Grande is to this what Ryan Gosling is to “Barbie:” a ditzy comedic performance dripping in pink, who every time is not on-screen you are begging to return. Grande starts off like one of Regina George’s cronies, telling herself she’s well-meaning and trying to make others popular but at the end of the day is self-serving and shallow. As the film goes on, she becomes more sympathetic but also is given more opportunities for physical comedy, a trait Grande is surprisingly great at (I’d love to see her in a romcom now). She also has moments where she is forced to hide pain behind a smile, and it’s done with surprising nuance. I’m happily eating crow on this, and will now be going door-to-door now through January to ensure she gets an Oscar nomination, a sentence I never thought I would be typing merely 24 hours ago.

Cynthia Ervio is solid enough as Elphaba, the misunderstood green witch who will one day get melted by Dorthy (spoiler for an 85-year-old movie). I think she makes all the obvious acting choices that most actresses would in this kind of role, but she does a good job hitting the high notes and shares some oddball chemistry with Grande. Jonathan Bailey isn’t really given too much to do other than be hot and lead the film’s best musical number, but he has a nice charm about him and continues the “goofy, hot prince” motif we’ve seen in “Ella Enchanted,” “Enchanted,” and the recent adaptation of “Cinderella.”

The film cost $150 million so naturally you would expect it to look good, but in the modern blockbuster age where $200 million DC Comics movies look like PlayStation 2 cutscenes and Disney movies lose Best Special Effects to a $15 million Godzilla movie, there is no more status quo. The trailers weren’t giving much hope either, with the colors looking saturated and the world looking mostly like it exists only in front of a green screen. The actual result is luckily more polished, with some nice “Harry Potter”-esque sets and visual effects that aren’t distracting. The musical numbers are solid (as to be expected from a Broadway adaptation), though Chu’s blocking isn’t the best at times.

The tone is a bit jumpy, going from emotional and mirroring real-world race relations and prejudices, to silly fashion montages and cute romantic meet-cutes (again, haven’t seen the show so not sure if that’s a problem there, too). I don’t think it ever reaches the point of detrimental tonal whiplash, but at (a smooth but objectively stretched) 160 minutes I feel we could have streamlined things a bit.

On that same note, as a Part One we really don’t get much resolution to any storylines. We are introduced to problems that I have to assume will be answered in next year’s “Part Two” but unlike “Across the Spider-Verse,” “Avengers: Infinity War,” or “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” this doesn’t feel like it can stand entirely as its own movie (the final shot/line of dialogue of the film are literally in the trailer).

“Wicked” features a fantastic performance from Ariana Grande and enough magical whimsy to scratch the itch you may be feeling after a lack of “Harry Potter” in recent years (as I typed that, I remembered we literally had a new “Fantastic Beasts” entry just two years ago, but feel that says it all). How much mileage you get will certainly vary based on your tolerance for musicals, and I’m sure fans of the show have already watched it twice in the time it took to read this review, but in many ways “Wicked” feels like the kind of film that would come out around Christmas in the 2009-2014 era, and in a way that’s comforting.

Critics Rating: 7/10