'Glicked' is no 'Barbenheimer'

Stop me if you’ve heard this one: A candy-colored phenomenon beloved by women of all ages is making its big-screen debut on the same day as a violent, R-rated historical epic with far more masculine appeal. This weekend sees the release of “Wicked,” a $145 million adaptation of the long-running Broadway musical based on Gregory Maguire’s novel spinning a revisionist history of the Wicked Witch of the West’s rivalry with former bestie Glinda the Good Witch. It’s in the arena against “Gladiator II,” Ridley Scott’s extremely belated sequel to his 2000 Best Picture winner, which finds a next-generation cast assisted by screen legend Denzel Washington because all the stars of the first movie died at the end.

It’s probably impossible to replicate the fluke juggernaut of “Barbenheimer,” which captured the imagination of audiences and briefly returned movies to the center of the cultural conversation with two smart, non-sequel blockbusters that were actually about something, both made at an exceptionally high level of craft. Lightning doesn’t strike twice, no matter how many Hollywood marketing executives are out flying kites in the rain. One problem this time is that there’s no good portmanteau. “Wick-iator” is too much of a mouthful. The internet seems to be going with “Glicked,” which sounds OK when you say it out loud but reads like the past tense of a sex act.

Another problem is that the films themselves aren’t that great.

Advance sales have been excellent, if not up to “Barbenheimer” levels. And boy, do theaters need this. The strike shutdowns of 2023 left a paucity of big-ticket pictures to fill multiplex screens this year, with the surprise flops of supposed sure bets like “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga” and “Joker: Folie à Deux” leaving theater owners scrambling. Ian Judge, creative director of the Somerville Theatre, told me he had to call on the old, reliable Sir Alfred Hitchcock to fill the gaps. The theater’s “A Bit of Hitch” retrospective was a fall smash, with the hundreds of people who turned out on weeknights for 70mm presentations of “North By Northwest” and “Vertigo” and proving that folks still want to come to the movies if you give them something decent to see.

How about half-decent? Or half of a decent movie? Deftly concealed in the movie’s marketing blitz is the revelation that “Wicked” only adapts the first act of the Broadway musical, ending with a “To Be Continued” title card and “Wicked: Part Two” set to arrive in theaters next Thanksgiving. There’s no real reason for doing this besides corporate greed, though my favorite excuse was when director John M. Chu claimed it’s impossible to follow Act One’s closing show-stopper “Defying Gravity” – as if they haven’t been doing exactly that onstage every night at the Gershwin Theatre for the past 21 years. The Broadway production runs two hours and 45 minutes, including a 15-minute intermission. “Wicked: Part One” runs 160 minutes and only covers the first half of the show. (Probably rude of me to point this out, but 1939’s “The Wizard of Oz” got everything done in a tight 102.)

Anyway, it’s a surprisingly engaging half-a-movie, anchored by a sublime comic turn from pop superstar Ariana Grande as Glinda (originally Galinda, we learn) playing the pink icon as a privileged brat blithely oblivious to her own awfulness. She initially bickers with her surly, green-skinned roommate Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) at a school that I keep calling Hogwarts in my head but is really Shiz University. “Wicked” owes a lot more to J.K. Rowling than to L. Frank Baum, with the two pupils vying for the attention of a sorcery instructor (Michelle Yeoh) who might not entirely be on the level, then later uncovering the secret fascist machinations of a charlatan wizard, played by a perfectly cast Jeff Goldblum.

Unlike most people making musicals today, director Chu knows how to stage a song-and-dance number, which one might think would be a job requirement but you’d be surprised. He understands how to incorporate the camera as a participant and engages multiple planes of action instead of just flatly photographing his stars while they sing. I thought his 2021 take on “In the Heights” looked too much like a Pepsi commercial — though admittedly, I am allergic to Lin-Manuel Miranda — and “Wicked” has a color palette that requires some getting used to. Unlike the crisp Technicolor Oz we all grew up with, Chu’s is a land entirely of hazy, low-contrast pinks and faded pastels. The whole movie looks like an Easter basket, which can be a bit tiring on the eyes over such a long haul.

Co-screenwriter Winnie Holzman — who also penned the book for the Broadway show — was one of the primary creative forces behind TV’s “My So-Called Life,” one of the all-time great depictions of how a young girl’s friendships fall in and out of feuds. This skill set serves her well with “Wicked,” even though everyone at this school appears to be in their early 30s. The story is full of unsubtle allegories about racism and scapegoating, in this case with a literal goat. As someone unfamiliar with the Broadway show, I had to wonder why the characters were so freaked out by a student with green skin when their class was being taught by a barnyard animal. I think that would be a much bigger deal, but what do I know?

None of those nitpicks really matter when Grande and Erivo are singing, their voices wrapping around each other beautifully and building to a crescendo with a closing number that’s all that it is cracked up to be and more. A few weeks ago, when reviewing “Emilia Perez” I bemoaned the lack of catchy or otherwise memorable tunes in modern movie musicals. Well, we’re now on day 15 of “Defying Gravity” being stuck in my head. I guess it lives there now. End of Act One.

“Gladiator II” is a much sillier film than its predecessor, which is something of a relief. Revisiting the dour Oscar-winner for the first time in 24 years, I was reminded of everything I disliked about director Ridley Scott’s work during the early 2000s, from the murky cinematography and spatial incoherence to the humorless solemnity that sapped all the fun out of stuff like Russell Crowe wrestling with tigers. Scott turns 87 at the end of the month, and he’s a much looser, goofier filmmaker now than he was in his 50s and 60s. The stentorian precision has been replaced by a trashy, devil-may-care exuberance that’s enlivened prestige pictures like his campy 2021 “House of Gucci” or last year’s shockingly irreverent “Napoleon.”

Script-wise, “Gladiator II” is a typical legacy sequel in how it splits and reshuffles familiar elements from the first film, with Crowe’s character traits divided between Paul Mescal as a slave fighting to avenge his slain wife and Pedro Pascal as a reluctant Roman general who’s too soulful a dude for all this conquering and killing. Instead of Joaquin Phoenix’s petty, pipsqueak emperor, we’ve now got twin syphilitic twinks (Fred Hechinger and Joseph Quinn) going all Caligula on the throne. One of them even appoints his pet monkey as senate counsel. The monkey wears a dress. It’s adorable.

Into all of this strides Denzel Washington, clearly having the time of his life as a duplicitous slave-trader with a revenge scheme he’s keeping close to his chest. Washington makes a meal out of the overripe dialogue and then goes on to devour the digital scenery as well, performing one monologue while gesticulating with a severed head and showing up every other actor in the cast, who are all entirely out of their league in the face of such megawatt charisma.

The woefully miscast Mescal is supposed to be playing the physical embodiment of bloodthirsty vengeance yet comes off as an affable galoot. (I’ve met more intimidating kindergarten teachers, and frequent flashbacks to Crowe at his most feral do the young man no favors.) Pascal barely registers onscreen at all, with a good deal of “Gladiator II” serving as a cautionary tale about what happens to lightweight TV actors when they come up against a bona fide movie star. It’s like every scene is being acted in lowercase letters until along comes big-D Denzel. He’s an absolute joy to watch, and the film languishes in his absence.

Scott amuses himself with increasingly absurd bread and circuses, like gladiators fighting fanged baboons, riding rhinoceroses, and at one point pitted against each other aboard paddle boats in a flooded Coliseum filled with sharks. The movie makes no pretense of caring a whit about historical accuracy, and I chuckled aloud at a shot of a Roman senator reading his morning newspaper, some 1,200 years before the invention of the printing press. “Gladiator II” probably isn’t what anyone would call a good movie, but I can’t say I was not entertained.

“Wicked” and “Gladiator II” are now in theaters.