Oz The Great and Powerful

You should all know, I was not terribly interested in this movie. the trailers did nothing to sell me on it, but even before the trailers, I thought it sounded like a terrible idea. Hell, when I first heard about it when Robert Downy Jr. was attached, I thought it sounded stupid. I am not why we are in a place in popular culture where we want to give back stories to all of these characters that have existed in one way for so long. A&E is about to premiere a television show showing how Norman Bates came to be Norman Bates from Psycho. it looks great, but do we really need it? DO we really want to attribute reason and emotion to our scariest villains? Did we not learn our lesson with Darth Vader? Did learning his back story enrich our vision of who Darth Vader was? I submit that it did not. When I watched the Wizard of Oz as a child I never once wondered about the character of Oz. I never wondered how he happened into Oz and became the great king of the Emerald City. I never once wondered how the Wicked Witch came to be the Wicked Witch. I just knew her cackle was terrifying and that she was exactly what you think of when you think of a bad witch. I just did not care much about what happened before The Wizard of Oz. The joy of free movies is that I do not have to be picky, so loaded with all of that, my girlfriend and I set off to the land of Oz.

Small time Magician, Oz(James Franco) is nothing more than a con man who cannot resist a pretty face. After a particularly bad show in Kansas, Oz has to make a great escape to not get beaten to death by the strong man of the traveling circus because Oz slept with the strong man's wife. Oz hops aboard a hot air balloon and thinks he has gotten away scot-free, until he realizes he is heading straight for a giant twister. As he thinks he is about to die, he pleads to a higher power to spare his life and he will become a great man, and stop being a two bit con man. His balloon lands and he finds himself transported to a magical land called Oz. He is met by a beautiful witch, Theodora (Mila Kunis) who tells Oz that he must be the witch that the prophesy speaks of. Why you ask, well the prophesy states that a wizard carrying the same name as the city , Oz, would come, save them and become king. Oz, ever the con man, proclaims to be the powerful wizard Oz because he cannot resist power and a beautiful woman. As they travel to the kingdom, Oz, woos Theodora who immediately believes they will be married. When they reach the castle, Oz meets Theodora's sister, Evanora who tells Oz he must kill the Wicked Witch before he can become king. To kill her, he just needs to destroy her wand, the source of her power. Oz sets off with his Monkey slave (a cute and creepy CGI monkey voiced hilariously by Zach Braff)to find and kill the Wicked Witch. On their travels they encounter China Girl (voiced by Joey King). China Girl is a seriously adorable little child made of porcelain whose entire family was murdered by some seriously scary flying baboons. She joins them on their hunt, but everything is not what it appears to be in Oz. The Wicked Witch turns out to be Glinda the Good (Michelle Williams) and Oz soon joins her. Of course Glinda knows he is not really a wizard, but she needs the people to believe in him and for him to believe in himself.

Oz The Great and Powerful is an incredibly mixed bag. I am not sure I have ever felt this much love and hate towards one movie. Visually the film is absolutely stunning. It is the first movie I have seen in 3D that actually looked good in 3D. In fact, I think it does actually add to the experience, which I have never said before. The colors are lush and gorgeous. The camera work is fluid and luscious and so many of the set pieces are just breath taking. The action is shot in a way that makes the 3D makes you flinch over and over again, and Raimi's trademark POV shots are all excellent. The camera becomes a character over and over again. If nothing else, the film is a gorgeous moving piece of visual art. The colors are the most vibrant shade, and the levels of color are rich. When the 3D is needed, things fly at you with such gusto that I literally flinched 6 or 7 times. The sequence in the graveyard with the fog is genuinely haunting and any time the baboons are on screen, it might be among the more terrifying PG rated film making. In fact, the movie works better when the action is scarier. That should not surprise any fan of Sam Raimi. There are quite a few Sam Raimi trademarks, including a cameo by the great Bruce Campbell.

I also found James Franco to be perfect in a mad scientist kind of way. His energy level is go go go throughout the movie and he plays Oz as always looking for a way to charm someone and because of this, there is always a glint in his eye and a smile on his face. He has to carry the picture and I was surprised at great of a job he does. He effortlessly breezes through charming the trio of leading ladies, and watching him freak out over all of the gold was a high point for me. I love when he went all Scrooge McDuck all over it. He gives the movie an energy level that unfortunately the rest of the cast cannot really sustain. I found his interactions with Braff to be great, and Braff is great. I am sure so much of his dialog was improvised because he sounds far from the rest of the script. The China Girl will break and warm your heart, but she also has spunk, which was a nice addition.

Everything else was terrible. The story was awful, the plotting of the story was not only sadly predictable, but boring. I found the pacing of the film to be extremely off putting and if the backdrop had not been so perfect, I would have been bored several times. The script was very uneven. Raimi likes to bring a sort of B-movie quality to his movies that I appreciate, but here much of it just missed the mark. Mila Kunis, who I adore, gave one of the worst performances I have seen in a while. Kunis can play dark (see Black Swan)but she cannot play evil. I was embarrassed for her watching her try to get all evil and try to match Franco's energy. She was not anywhere near his level and really brought the second half of the movie to a screeching halt. Disney is also forbidden by MGM to use the green of the witch, so the actual Wicked Witch is this awful neon shade of green and her face is not allowed to look the same because MGM trademarked it, so the face just looks ridiculous and not terribly scary. It is not hard for me to understand why I have seen so many people walk out of the movie early. Story wise, Oz The Great and Powerful is truly awful.

Here I sit the next day and my feelings are no less mixed. As a visual spectacle, the movie is definitely worth seeing. I have no idea if it looks as good in 2D, and I did not pay, so it is easy for me to say it was worth it to upgrade to 3D. Franco does some pretty great work considering I thought he was poorly cast as the lead of a big budget CGI heavy film and to be honest, there are times when he is acting opposite something CGI where he looks like he knows it is ridiculous. I enjoyed the two supporting CGI characters and Raimi does some great work with the camera, the 3D effects and the landscape. However, the movie is a boring mess, with a anti-climatic finish and a story that makes no sense in places. A sequel has already started being written and I have no clue how in the world they are going to make a sequel that is not a remake of The Wizard of Oz because of how this one ends. Honestly, by the time the movie reached the end, I stopped caring about the movie and just enjoyed looking at the pretty things. It was such a weird experience to love and hate a movie as much as I did with this one. I really do not recommend the movie unless you can afford the 3D because I definitely cannot recommend it for the story.

Final Grade: C