“Glicked”: Are You Not Entertained?
Don’t fight the arrival of Wicked and Gladiator II. Accept them, allow them both to wash over you and leave no trace.
Stills from Gladiator II and Wicked. (Paramount / Universal)
When I saw Wicked, at the end of the well-attended matinee screening, an enthusiastic little boy who was there with a big family group yelled out, “Everybody clap!” and the whole audience burst into applause.
I didn’t like the movie, but I liked the boy. So on his behalf, I say bless you all, may you and your little movie-going community enjoy Wicked and clap at the end. May you even carry on and watch Gladiator II in a day-killing double feature, thereby getting a kick out of the phenomenon known as “Glicked,” a seemingly desperate marketing ploy to gin up another hugely profitable “Barbenheimer” experience that united two dissimilar big-budget releases last year: Barbie and Oppenheimer.
It’s been a very hard year, 2024, and we all need a break. It’s been a particularly ghastly year for American movies. I hadn’t realized quite how bad it’s been until I saw Anora last week and felt the tears come to my eyes because it’s such a good movie — and that means the once-thriving American cinema isn’t quite done yet.
In my view, Wicked and Gladiator II aren’t good movies. They’re both big and frenetic and silly and noisy, however, and we’re such a depleted country, we’ll take that as a substitute for good and feel grateful doing it.
And both films even have a vaguely topical quality, with plots about autocratic rulers failing the citizenry. When Elphaba in Wicked intones, “Something bad is happening in Oz,” we know exactly how she feels.
But both movies also foster that familiar, tired feeling we get at the multiplex these days, which might be called sequel sickness or remake fatigue. Wicked and Gladiator II are retreads, made of material so familiar it seems redundant to summarize them. Wicked the movie is the end point in a long chain of adaptations going back to L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz book series, a landmark in children’s literature that began running in 1900. The 1939 film musical version of it that made a star out of Judy Garland still haunts the imagination of several generations, including influential filmmakers such as David Lynch and Joel and Ethan Coen. The best-selling 1995 book Wicked by Gregory Maguire was the basis of the long-running hit Broadway musical of the same name, written by Winnie Holzman with music and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz, which has finally wound its way to this movie version directed by Jon M. Chu (In the Heights, Crazy Rich Asians).
It’s only part one, however. At an excruciatingly long two hours and forty minutes, the film only covers the first half of the plot, the early life and education of Galinda (Ariana Grande) and Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo), frenemies who will become the characters we know as Glinda the Good Witch and the Wicked Witch of the West.
Wicked has one of those plots, so popular in recent years, in which characters who were the epitome of evil in classic tales are now viewed sympathetically in terms of how they got their bad reputations. But if the villain character turns out to be good or at least understandable in their malevolence, explained in Psychology 101 terms, someone has to play the role of their tormenters, and so figures of virtue are exposed as deeply flawed at best.
If Dr Seuss’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, the storybook and the beloved TV special, is the source material, for example, we get the movie The Grinch (2018), centered on the title character’s backstory as a sympathetic green baby growing up shunned by the shallow, unfeeling, materialistic Whos down in Whoville until he turns into the Christmas-hating anti-Who figure we recognize. Once you get the formula, it’s easy to see what a goldmine this was for pop fiction authors and screenwriters.
In Wicked, Grande as Galinda flutters around being pretty in pink, but she’s superficial and self-centered and sings high soprano odes to the all-importance of being “Popular.” So it’s hate at first sight when Erivo’s Elphaba, solemnly studious and mysteriously green-skinned, with a traumatic childhood to put behind her, is forced to share a dormitory suite with Galinda at Shiz University. The issue of skin color in terms of racial prejudice is evoked in the early scenes of Elphaba’s shunning.
Though Galinda has all the ambition to be a sorceress studying with the svelte and insinuating Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh), it’s Elphaba who has all the magical talent. So the roommates are rivals for achievement in magic. Soon they’re romantic rivals as well, vying for the attentions of the dashing Prince Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey). He seems shallow and hedonistic, a perfect match for Galinda, but he shows hidden depths when he’s with Elphaba.
Nevertheless, a gradual girl-power friendship develops between the roommates, seemingly overcoming Galinda’s envy when Elphaba’s extraordinary gifts bring her to the attention of the wonderful Wizard of Oz (Jeff Goldblum) in Emerald City. In the classic version of the tale, he was revealed to be the plaintive “man behind the curtain” operating the terrifying public face of the powerful wizard, who described himself as “a very good man, but a very bad wizard.” So you can guess what he turns out to be in Wicked.
Goldblum is entertaining as always, Erivo is a genuinely gifted performer, and apparently there are people who can even enjoy Ariana Grande. Anyway, as I emerged from the theater with my ears bleeding from innumerable choruses of the big climactic song “Defying Gravity,” I was looking forward to the blood-and-guts contrast of Gladiator II.
The Return of Gladiators
Constantly trying to revive memories of the far more vibrant 2000 hit Gladiator, the sequel backfires because it reminds audiences of Russell Crowe’s memorably meaty performance as Maximus.
There’s his armor, his sword, his former love Lucilla (Connie Nielsen), and that nice shot of his hand brushing along the stalks of wheat on the farm he lost when he was forced into gladiatorial combat. It reminds us repeatedly that we have to make do with a strangely bland Irish actor named Paul Mescal (All of Us Strangers). He’s a muscular blank as our hero Lucias Veras Aurelius, who’s struggling to survive the brutal life of combat in Roman arenas. There’s a lot of plottiness about Lucius’s unawareness of his parentage and roots in Rome, because he was spirited away as a child and raised as “Hanno” in Numidia. That territory gets conquered by the triumphal legions of Roman General Acacius (Pedro Pascal), and Lucius is dragged back to Rome as a slave assigned to fight in the arena.
Instead of the sword-and-sandal thrills of solemn and deadly gladiatorial contests in the Roman arena, we get cartoonish computer-generated excesses that are more ludicrous each time the gladiators step out into the ring. The first time, they have to fight maddened baboons. If you know anything about baboons in real life, you know that means goodbye gladiators, because every one of them is going to be slaughtered as the ferociously fanged primates tear them all to shreds. But in Gladiator II, with its airy indifference to physical reality, many of the gladiators seem to survive unscathed, and Lucius gets his first triumph in the ring by besting the fiercest baboon in hand-to-paw combat and strangling the animal to death with the chains that bind him.
But that’s nothing. The next time out, the gladiators fight a Roman riding a rhinoceros. Can you ride a rhinoceros, with a saddle and bridle and reins and all that, as if it were a huge horned show pony? No — no, you cannot. Nor can you defeat a rhinoceros by throwing dust in its eyes, as Lucius does. It’s still going to run you down and trample your bloody remains.
After that scene, I thought, what can the gladiators possibly be made to fight in subsequent arena battles. Sharknado? And, you know, that facetious guess turned out to be pretty close to correct. So there are plenty of unintentionally comical moments to see you through.
It’s also fortunate that the usually magisterial Denzel Washington is having such a good time in this mess, playing Macrinus, a former slave who’s used his trickster intelligence to acquire the most formidable stable of gladiators and rise in Roman society, to the point that he hobnobs with senators and royalty. He’s even on palsy terms with the twin emperors (Joseph Quinn and Fred Hechinger), pale, effete, mentally unstable fellows who symbolize the decadence of the failing Roman empire. Macrinus has a plan to depose them and rule in their stead, and in playing him, Washington swaggers and smirks his way through the role, embracing the epic cheesiness around him.
Which is the right attitude, really. Why fight it? Are you not entertained? So enjoy the “Glicked” experience, and happy Thanksgiving to all!