Overscaled
and underwhelming, Sam Raimi’s Oz the
Great and Powerful traffics in big bucks, big bangs, and small ideas. Unlike
recent eye-popping spectacles like James Cameron’s Avatar or Martin Scorsese’s Hugo,
the simplistic, emotionally empty origin story is neither magical nor dreamlike. Oz has no brains, no heart, no courage and, perhaps even sadder, no
imagination.
The
film, written by Mitchel Kapner and David Lindsay-Abaire, hews faithfully close
to its flashy forbearer, Victor Fleming’s lavish The Wizard of Oz, but the comparison is not in Raimi’s favor. For
all of the director’s energy and exuberance, the frenzied marketing and
promotion of the movie are more enthusiastic and original that its clichéd plot,
and one might suspect more thoughtful as well. The film repeats all the
mistakes of Disney’s Alice in Wonderland,
only does so without the redeeming qualities of Johnny Depp or Tim Burton.
