Variety’s Peter Debruge rarely lays it in the line —his deft phrasings often seem to skirt or hint at his actual, true-blue reactions —.but his real feelings about Jon M. Chu’s Wicked: For Good are evident in the first paragraph of his 11.18 review, as well as in the final one.
It’s not exactly a rave when you say that a film prompts you to think “whew, he didn’t blow it!”
At the very end Debruge says that most of the film is generated by and represented by Hollywood’s “apex of artificiality…for better or worse.” Isn’t that a bit like a dude telling his girlfriend that while she’s nominally pretty, much of her attractiveness is due to expensive, artfully applied make-up…”for better or worse”?
This is not an expression of wondrous rapturous delight!
