The witches: "Wicked: Part 1"

You've had the cuddly-cosy British festitainment (a third helping of Paddington that suggested the marmalade of inspiration was running thin), now here's the American theatre-kid equivalent. Anyone who hasn't been fully schooled in this particular idiom - those who never attended summer camp, say, or skipped Glee - may well find Jon M. Chu's new big-screen version of Wicked a semi-baffling and oddly punishing experience, but it's also instructive as to where Hollywood's head is at 85 years on from The Wizard of Oz. Because Harry Potter and Dune - because today's movie executives reneged on the deal their predecessors struck with cinemagoers a century ago - what you'll be paying for here is in fact half a movie, stretched like fairground taffy or candyfloss to 160 minutes, with sets the size of small European countries and scenes that go on for days. (One glaring flaw was apparently integral to the initial pitch, which had to have been something like: what if we approached the hit musical Wicked as seriously as Angels in America?) The idea is to build a world that might eventually provide the foundation for a popular theme-park ride (or, perhaps, theme park: as so often nowadays, a lumbering movie presents as the slenderest sliver of a corporate masterplan), while inverting the structures of a world long set in place. The set-up, certainly, gestures towards a postmodern overhaul of L. Frank Baum: the good witch (embodied here by Ariana Grande) reframed as a condescending liberal hairtosser who exists in a bubble, the bad witch (Cynthia Erivo) now an animal liberation activist dismissed for her skin colour, the two roomies shown as having far more in common than divides them. Both leads do their own singing, and sing perfectly well, but the voice that recurred in my head during Wicked: Part 1 was that of the decidedly non-postmodern (and wholly untheatrical) Karl Pilkington, asking the big question here: do we need it? Theatre kids would doubtless answer in the affirmative, but then that's what their training tells them to do. We moviebrats would, I think, do well to raise a more sceptical eyebrow, if not send in the flying monkeys.

For once the initial sucrose rush wears off, nothing about this Wicked proves as substantial or lasting as the 1939 film, a high bar, granted, but also - even with its multiple directors and lengthy lore - a logistically simpler studio production that permitted far more complex responses and interpretations. In this most Disneyish of Universal pictures, everything has been tuned to the key of feelgood, and a callow literalism holds sway, from the opening camera swoop over a CG rainbow to the climactic staging of "Defying Gravity" on a staircase fashioned from the song's own soaring chords. In place of imagination, we get VFX (many more talking animals than there can have been on stage) and production design as far as the eye can see, childproofed action within tightly guarded boundaries. I can rarely remember seeing a piece of (admittedly corporate) art that trusts so little in its creators, set to faithfully replicating and amplifying the original show's songs and cues, much as the Potter movies ploughed doggedly through every last line of JK Rowling's prose; I can't recall seeing a film that demonstrates less trust in its audience, put as we are here through nearly three hours of back-to-school moral instruction with no immediate payoff and nary a pause to think for ourselves. But then there may be no need for thought with this Wicked; it's a movie for the brainless scarecrows among us. Between the Oz-ness and the Potter-ness and the Wicked-ness and the High School Musical-ness, there's barely an original gesture for anyone to have to interpret: we know where all this is going narratively, up a long and winding yellow brick road, and the ever-amenable Chu (Step Up 2: The Streets, Step Up 3D, G.I. Joe: Retaliation, Now You See Me 2) isn't one for surprises or deviations, good, bad, nasty or otherwise.

The strongest scenes here - the ones that succeed in getting something more than a varyingly faint echo going - throw Erivo and Grande together as a fantasyland odd couple, the former based, wary and quizzical, the latter as frothy, creamy and synthetic as strawberry Angel Delight. But even on sets as cavernous as these, there never seems to be much room for them to manoeuvre: their words and actions are largely bound by the same cautious mirroring as the prom dance that binds them to one another as good little freaks. A machine-movie such as this, made to roll over a willing audience, allows no scope for wildness or other forms of misbehaviour. Both witches only ever exist on the level of PG-rated cartoon characters - the effect heightened by Erivo's jade make-up and Grande's squeaky delivery - and never make the leap to perishable flesh-and-blood that Wicked needs to function as the social allegory it thinks it is. Cosseting us with lullabies and nursery rhymes, it is, then, another fundamentally childish proposition from the studios, one that invites and needs our indulgence. (The suits' rationale: so what if it's half of the world's most expensive rough cut? It's Christmas.) But what if we don't indulge it? What if we misbehave, or at least attempt to resist the roughly 1500 spoonfuls of sugar Chu strives to shovel down our throats with every passing frame? Writing as one who hadn't endured the musical, I can report the movie Wicked at least explains why no-one talks about the musical Wicked without reference to the sublime "Defying Gravity", a genuine modern showstopper repurposed here as a temporary film-and-storystopper. It is, plainly, because none of the other songs come within touching distance. (With typical perversity, Hollywood pushes for a musical revival at the exact moment Stephen Sondheim and Adam Schlesinger have taken their final bows: only the Lin-Manuel Miranda-less Moana 2 can save us now.) Opening weekend takings indicate Wicked has, indeed, defied box-office gravity. Yet this is a production that mistakes length and scale for weight and depth, and confuses the grand gesture with the empty one; that song might have resonated all the more if there were any real gravity here to defy, or anything beyond lip service paid to defiance.

Wicked is now playing in cinemas nationwide.