Oz the Great and Powerful (2013)

You know, Fudderwacking was bad, but at least when Johnny Depp Fudderwacked all over our faces in that popped zit of a Tim Burton nightmare "Alice in Wonderland," he wasn't Fudderwacking all over a cinematic masterpiece. Because let's be real here: "Alice in Wonderland" is a cult-following thing. It's got a loyal, Hot Topic going fan-base that loves their Alice with a bloody knife posters, Cheshire Cat tattoos, and clove cigarettes. But as far as importance to film goes, it's not that notable. Honestly it's probably one of Disney's weaker films from that era. With "The Wizard of Oz," however, it's a different story. That's rightly considered one of the best films of all time.

Which makes "Oz the Great and Poweful" even worse than the new "Alice in Wonderland." Oh yeah. It's that bad.

Gaze upon me and despair.

I can't say I expected great things from "OtGaP." Not least among the reasons for that being that it was over 70 years late to the party. But given that I like James Franco and (generally) Sam Raimi, I was hoping for some entertainment at the very least. Most likely stupid entertainment but entertainment none the less. What I got made me feel like I had just wasted my time watching a commercial for CGI.

Oh yeah. It's like I'm back in 1939. That's going to be SEAMLESS playing the films back-to-back.

"OtGaP" follows Oscar Diggs (James Franco), a circus magician from Kansas who finds himself in another world after being sucked into it via tornado. He immediately finds himself involved in a vaguely defined power struggle between three witch sisters, Theodora (Mila Kunis), Evanora (Rachel Weisz), and Glinda (Michelle Williams), who are painfully naive, obviously evil, and blandly good, respectively. A vague prophecy has foretold that Oscar will lead the land to freedom or something, so in the interest of making money off of it, he agrees to help.

Along the way he meets a talking monkey in a bellhop suit, played by the painfully unfunny Zack Braff, who follows him around the whole time doing his irritating, awkward comic relief, since heaven forbid we don't have one of those. There's also a china doll who is never named and pretty much is useless until the end of the film when she inexplicably runs what has to be nearly 2 miles in under 5 minutes, all while having legs like 5 inches long. I must admit - that's impressive.

"Oh no! It's been 14 seconds and I haven't said something awkward and stammering yet! I'm losing my touch."

It's a standard story of a jerk becoming slightly less of a jerk because he helps the "good guys," not so much because he realizes the error of his ways but because the other side threatens to kill him. And of course since we knew exactly what happens since it's a prequel (you know Oz lives, you know Glinda lives, you know one of the other two sisters is turning into the Wicked Witch of the West and the other into the Wicked Witch of the East), it becomes not only standard but a waste of our time, like we're in grade school being sent back to the third grade after skipping from second grade to forth. We know all this. A talking, unfunny monkey isn't going to make up for the fact that "OtGaP" is completely unnecessary, and feels like it.

Like I said, I normally am a fan of James Franco, but here he's pretty dreadful and more than a bit miscast. Although maybe he would have done better had it not seemed like he had smoked bales of weed throughout the process of filming. Maybe he needed it to see Oz since it's clear that nearly nothing he was looking at was really there, and was put in later via computer. Guess they've got me on that one.

Oh look. She found James Franco's trailer.

On the other hand there's no excuse for the three ladies playing the witches, who were across the board terrible. Mila Kunis is acting like she's straight out of a high school play with all the believability she conveys. Michelle Williams has nothing to work with being the boring one of the group, and boy does she sell that. I suppose Rachel Weisz was the best of them, but she's so over-the-top comic book villainous that it comes off more as parody than actual menace. And how Mila Kunis' character doesn't get the fact that her sister is irrevocably evil is beyond me, and just makes her character that much more unrelatable and irritating.

And when she becomes The Wicked Witch of the West...this is the effect they go for. Yeah. They thought that looked good.

Also not helping matters is that the script has them all having what is essentially the same conversation over and over and over again for nearly two hours:

Oz - "You know I'm not really the Wizard, right?"
A Witch - "We need you to be the Wizard, though."
Oz - "I know, right? But I don't think I am."
A Witch - "You could lie about it and just say you are."
Oz - "I know, right? I should do that."
A Witch - "Okay then. But seriously, are you the Wizard?"
::repeat till credits::

UGH.

And they could have a least done us a small favor and made "OtGaP" actually look like the original film, seeing as it's supposed to be a precede to it. In much the same way that the "Star Wars" prequels made everything shiny and fake-looking and basically nothing like the originals, this film smacks us in the face with the computer generated landscapes and creatures that make me feel like I'm watching "Avatar," because you know, that's a movie that looks JUST like "The Wizard of Oz." And like "Avatar" and unlike the original, here everything looks fake, because for the overwhelming majority, it is. Nothing is practical when it could be done in a computer in this film. They go so far as to even have fake snowflakes, because I guess the technology to freeze water is just beyond the filmmakers.

What part of "Wizard of Oz" screamed $200,000,000 budget? I'd really like to know.

How about this: Make "OtGaP." Nobody asked for it, but go ahead. But do everything the way they did it in 1939. I'm talking actual sets, matte paintings, costumes, and old fashioned camera tricks. No CGI at any point. I don't care about the old argument that "Practical costs more," you cannot tell me that it would be anywhere close to $200,000,000. It'd probably be 20% of that at absolute most. And hell, you've got Sam Raimi, who has proven in the past to be very good at practical effects when he wants to be.

Guess what? People will still see it. It's a sequel to "The Wizard of Oz." And you've spent so little on it that there is no way you won't get your money back. Who cares if people will probably complain about the old-fashioned nature of it? You obviously don't care from the start about quality based on the film I just saw. AND it would actually look like "The Wizard of Oz." What a thought.

Yeah, it's as bad as the trailer made it look.

THE BOTTOM LINE - This is a film without any kind of soul whatsoever - a hollow, vapid exercise in using pretty things to distract you from the fact that nothing of any substance is happening, nobody in the film cares about being there, and nobody involved in the creation of it had any intention of giving us anything other than a tech demo of the capabilities of their computer software. No imagination is to be found. No wonderment. No spirit. No emotion besides bad melodrama and James Franco looking stoned off his ass.