Oz the Great and Powerful (2013)

Sam Raimi is one of those directors where every film he makes feels like a passion project. He pours himself into almost every frame of his work, and you often get the sense that he is absolutely thrilled to be doing what he’s doing. It’s especially admirable that his sensibility is able to occasionally bleed through in a film like Oz the Great and Powerful, a project that in other hands would wind up being little more than a visual effects reel in the vein of Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland. It still occasionally drops to that level, inevitably, but the only reason this movie is engaging at all is because of his obvious (and somewhat surprising) love for the source material. On a story and character level, it disappointed me in just about all the wrong parts. But every once in a while it’s able to pull a funny and/or surprising moment out of thin air. Faults and all, it does not surprise me at all that audiences seem to be eating this one up.

James Franco stars as the eponymous wizard who would go on to be played by Frank Morgan in the 1939 original The Wizard of Oz. He begins the film as a small-time magician working with a travelling circus in the middle of Kansas, and much like in the original Raimi films these sequences in black and white. When he needs to make a quick and somewhat contrived escape from the circus, he hops on a hot air balloon that promptly sails right into a tornado. As you might have guessed, this transports him to the colorful, CGI-filled world of Oz, and he is quickly embraced by Theodora (Mila Kunis) as the one is supposed to bring peace to the land and be its leader. Oz must also deal with Evanora (Rachel Weisz), the Wicked Witch of the East and someone who would be best served to keep a look out for falling houses. The good witch Glinda also shows up, and she is played by Michelle Williams.

It all follows an achingly predictable path, and as a result the best moments come when we observe the characters simply existing in this very strange environment. For much of the movie the best relationship is between Oz and Finley, a flying monkey voiced by Zach Braff. I admit this is mostly because I have a strange weakness for animal sidekicks, but the interplay between the two of them is often amusing and has more emotional heft than anything involving the witches. About halfway through the movie it becomes quite obvious that this whole enterprise doesn’t quite have a goal beyond setting up the universe of the original classic. As a result, Oz has to sometimes stretch quite a bit to get where it needs to go. One of the most unconvincing arcs in the movie is that of Theodora, and more than anything else in the movie it feels as if it was forced into place rather than allowed to develop organicaly. Kunis also feels rather miscast here, though that doesn’t really become apparent until a big twist in the film’s latter half. Without spoiling it, there’s a certain aspect of Theodora’s character that Kunis can’t quite pull off. Though it’s potentially less her fault than that of the material.

Still, Raimi is such a creative force that he’s able to take the script and turn it into something impulsively watchable and intermittently entertaining. Even when the film leaps headfirst into the weightless CGI wonderland of Oz, Raimi’s distinct playfulness remains intact and he keeps it from becoming too generic. He's not as successful as he'd like to be, and by the time the movie reaches its climax I lost most of my interest. (Not coincidentally, Braff’s monkey character just about disappears by the end as well.) Oz the Great and Powerful is cursed by expectations; it comes with a list of things that it must accomplish and plot points it must hit before it can go on to do anything else. This severely restricts it from straying too far off the classic yellow brick road. It was a smart idea to get a director like Raimi to helm this project, but there’s only so much he can accomplish when you put him on a leash.

Grade: B-