This film image released by Disney Enterprises shows James Franco, left, and Michelle Williams in a scene from "Oz the Great and Powerful." |
The bad news - because it could use more heart, courage and brains.
"Oz, the Great and Powerful" comes in an opulent 3D package, but it's also a corporate product that confuses enchantment with investment, and seeks to compete with a beloved classic by being longer, louder, more technological and - in the biggest misstep - hipper.
You can almost hear the studio guys pursuing four-quadrant demographics: "Let's make the new wizard younger, more handsome. Let's make the witches (Mila Kunis, Rachel Weisz, Michelle Williams) sexy. Let's have some kissing. Some leather pants and high-heeled boots."
Or, let's not.
Instead, let's remember when the Academy Awards tried to get hipper and chase a bigger audience by hiring James Franco as host.
How did that work out?
About as well as it does in the new "Oz," starring a miscast Franco as Oscar, the man who will be Oz, a shifty magician working a rural Kansas carnival in 1905, where the "Pineapple Express" star looks like an iPhone in the Atwater Kent museum.
The monochrome prologue establishes Oscar as a ladies man, an incorrigible scoundrel - Franco tries, but the script calls for an actor who's lively, larcenous, verbally agile. Director Sam Raimi wanted Robert Downey Jr., who'd be perfect, but ended up with Franco (who may have signed on because he thought that the poppy fields were real).
The plot whisks Oscar via balloon to Oz, where he's mistaken for a prophesied wizard who'll free the inhabitants from the rule of an evil witch.
The plot has callow Oscar finding his inner decency and leading the good people and munchkins of Oz in a revolt against evil rule - dropping hints (and steering clear of copyright laws) about how some of the new "Oz" characters will evolve into those we know from the 1939 musical.
Raimi, to his credit, has thrown most of the money on-screen - a great tornado, a colorful and a sometimes-spectacular land of Oz that amplifies old motifs and adds some imaginative new ones.
But you sense that the movie is afraid to be subtle, or merely beautiful. It converts the flying monkeys into shrieking baboons, with longer teeth and bigger lungs. The screeching, digitized wicked witch, when she finally emerges, in no way threatens what Margaret Hamilton achieved with a little makeup.
New characters include a CGI monkey bellhop sidekick, and a china doll - the latter an example of a good concept (nicely animated) made problematic by a script that loses track of its own outlines.
This is true of the witches of Oz (a better title), whose psychologies and rivalries take up so much time and yield so little drama.
For all its flaws, though, "Oz" conjures a finale that nearly rights the ship - Oscar using sleight of hand and pure showmanship to face down his enemies, a finale that also functions as a tribute by Raimi to the magical power of illusion, the kind that movies can provide, and that this one does in fits and starts.