130 minutes Rated PG.
Quote: I am Oz, the great and powerful!
Oscar’s (James Franco) life sucks. Though he knows he’s destined for greatness, he’s stuck as a small-time carnival magician and ladies’ man in rural Kansas. Luckily, just when it looks like he’s doomed to eternal misunderstood schmuckdom, an angry circus strongman chases Oscar into a tornado and the our hero-ish person ends up in the magical technicolor land of Oz. The first thing he learns is that he’s the king, and the second thing he learns is that Oz girls are easy. After seducing the innocent witch Theodora (Mila Kunis) and making some time with her dark, sexy and politically powerful sister Evanora, (Rachel Weisz), Oscar kicks Theodora to the curb and goes off to kill the Wicked Witch Glinda (Michelle Williams), who turns out to be blonde and totally not wicked and a great kisser to boot. Theodora takes this about as well as you’d expect, and pretty soon, thanks to his own total lack of respect for all womankind, Oscar has two pissed-off magic users to fight instead of one.
Spoiler alert:
He wins anyway.
Why?
Got me.
First of all, let me just say that I’ve probably seen Army of Darkness fifteen or twenty times. So when I saw an Army of Darkness gag in Oz, I got it. It was cute. It was cute the second time too, though a little less so. By the end of the movie, I was done with the goddamned joke. Director Sam Raimi used AoD nods to shore up a very anemic and unimaginative plot, and oh how sorely did it need shoring. It dragged, it lagged, it did stupid things at stupid times. Oz is about forty-five minutes too long for a kids’ movie, and too much of that is just James Franco leering at all available girls.
Raimi’s style already lends itself well to 3D and he clearly maximized his advantage here. It’s a drop-dead gorgeous film, particularly in Imax. But in the end, eye candy wasn’t enough to carry Oz over the pitfalls of its weak cast and weaker writing, nevermind its excessive length.
After he gets out of Kansas, Oscar is essentially the only viable male in the cast. This is very lucky for him because his towering lack of charisma ought otherwise to prevent him from inspiring anything but laughter in any of the three gorgeous witches. Let us not mention the rest of the Oz-dwellers, who apparently need a male hero despite the fact that Glinda has magical superpowers and actually defeats one wicked witch on her own. Wait! You cry, Then why was Oscar necessary to the plot at all? After all, without his interference, there only would have been one witch to defeat, and it was clear that everyone in Oz was on Glinda’s side from the start anyway. Well, apparently Dead Father Wizard told everyone to wait for his male successor to fall out of the sky, and everyone… just believed him. This honestly sounds like the kind of joke that bitter theocrats make on their deathbeds to fuck with the heads of people who might or might not have just poisoned them.
For a film based on a wildly progressive and feminist book series, Oz represents a huge break with tradition. From Dorothy to Ozma, the land of Oz has traditionally been a place where intelligent and powerful women lead, quest, and command tremendous respect. Oscar was nowhere near as plucky or resourceful as Dorothy and the fact that he was essentially Photoshopped into a flat copy of her role was obnoxious. Fans of the original Wonderful Wizard of Oz as well as of the famous Geoffrey Maguire adaptation Wicked will be horrified at the sheer misogyny that James Franco brings to the role of the already pathetically inadequate “wizard.”
That brings us to the biggest problem with Oz: it hates. Hates. HATES. Women.
Even considering the fact that this is a Disney movie directed by Sam Raimi, the grade of the anti-woman slant is shocking. Oz portrays powerful women as unmotivated at best and evil at worst. The average women in the cast are just stupid, as evidenced by all the mean little tricks that Oscar can play on them. Friendly but tangential female characters are often inconsistent and offensively pidgeonholed. The most egregious example is China Girl (Joey King) who is an actual little girl made of china porcelain, who has no other name than China Girl, and who behaves alternately like an adult and like a ten-year-old as the script demands. (No name? SERIOUSLY?)
I appreciate Rachel Wiesz’s attempt to inject Evanora with depth, but there just isn’t enough to the role, and for all of her effort, Mila Kunis just can’t keep up. (Nevermind James Franco, who, when he remembers that he’s supposed to be doing something, spends the movie playing Bruce Campbell. Badly.) Michelle Williams is the only actress who really embodies her part, possibly because she acts as shallowly as her role is written (you haven’t seen sappy tragic doe-eyes until you’ve seen them in 3D Imax).
There’s really too much to hate about Oz. It’s impossible to summarize it all in about five minutes of reading, but there are a few low points. The blonde and beautiful Glinda is obviously the “good” witch and both brunette witches are “evil,” particularly since they both get real ugly. It goes without saying that any female who disagrees with the male lead’s actions for any reason either is already or instantly becomes a baddie. Finley the flying monkey (Zach Braff) is essentially Oscar’s slave and is ultimately rewarded with the mighty gift, not of his freedom, but of Oscar’s friendship and a stupid hat. Bruce Campbell‘s thirty-second cameo is better than Franco’s entire performance and I sincerely wish that the aging but still consistently hilarious Campbell had been cast in the lead instead. Oscar’s acquisition of a comically underdeveloped magic black man (Bill Cobbs) three-quarters of the way through the movie completes the fail cocktail.
Oz is a wildly insulting attempt at campy fun that not only fails dismally as a film, but manages to mire itself in a reeking swamp of issues in the process. I found it impossible to enjoy.
