Welcome to Memory Holed, a new column from MovieWeb deputy editor and film critic Britt Hayes (that’s me). Each week, I’ll revisit the movies (and occasionally TV shows) that were culturally relevant for a brief time before collapsing into obscurity. Whether they were notable for having high-profile casts, generating awards-season buzz, using popular IP, stirring controversy, igniting discourse, or any combination of the above, these movies have been deliberately erased from the pop-culture consciousness. In other words: they’ve been memory-holed.
If you’ve been following along with this column so far (or checking in with me on Bluesky), you may have observed an obvious pattern in the movies I’ve chosen: they’re all tangentially related or adjacent to a new release. So if you guessed that I’d be covering Sam Raimi’s Oz the Great and Powerful this week, as Wicked: For Good hits theaters, congrats. You don’t win anything, but if it makes you feel any better, neither do I! Instead, I spent two hours and change, split over two nights, watching Sam Raimi’s worst movie by a yellow-brick mile. A movie so horrible that I had to watch it in parts, without the luxury of doomscrolling on my phone to make it more palatable. You’re welcome.
Unlike other, much smarter people, I actually saw Oz the Great and Powerful when it was released back in 2013. Appropriately, I remembered very little about it – James Franco is Young Oz, and Rachel Weisz and Michelle Williams are also in it – and revisiting the movie continued an ongoing theme: people don’t remember this movie because it’s not very good! (Related, I recently realized that the secret goal of this column is to find a good movie that everyone has forgotten. TBD!) \
Oz the Great and Powerful was released four years after Raimi returned to the horror genre with 2009’s Drag Me to Hell, his first movie after the Spider-Man trilogy. Though it wasn’t a big hit, Drag Me to Hell was something of an instant cult classic and a promising sign of life from Raimi, who had been flirting with other franchise IP post-Spider-Man, including Jack Ryan, The Hobbit, and World of Warcraft (a strong candidate for a future column). Meanwhile, Disney had a long history with Oz, dating back to the 1930s, when they lost the rights to L. Frank Baum’s books to MGM, which released The Wizard of Oz. Disney managed to nab the rights in 1954, but only ever produced one film: 1985’s awesomely freaky Return to Oz, a flop-turned-cult classic and staple of my childhood.
It’s easy to imagine that the success of Wicked (the musical) both pissed off and emboldened Disney, which, encouraged by Tim Burton’s hideous yet extremely profitable Alice in Wonderland, accepted a pitch from screenwriter Mitchell Kapner (The Whole Nine Yards), who came up with an origin story for the least interesting character in all of Oz: the Wizard himself.
Possibly the nicest thing I can say about Oz the Great and Powerful is that we were spared a version starring Johnny Depp as the titular con-man, allegedly because he was busy filming The Lone Ranger and not because the Oz costuming didn’t include enough hats and scarves for his liking. Following some rewrites from acclaimed playwright David Lindsay-Abaire (Rabbit Hole), Disney tapped Raimi to direct, reuniting him with Spider-Man‘s James Franco, who would take on the role of Oscar Diggs, a.k.a. Oz.
As with the 1939 classic, Oz the Great and Powerful begins with a black-and-white sequence set in Kansas. A sleazy con-man magician named Oscar Diggs is desperately trying to avoid the consequences of his actions: his tricks are bunk, he can’t help a disabled girl in a wheelchair who wants to walk again, and the circus’ strongman wants to throttle Oscar for flirting with his wife. Topping it off, the one woman he might genuinely have feelings for – Annie, played by Michelle Williams – has decided to accept a proposal from a local fella named John Gale, suggesting that Annie is Dorothy Gale’s mom and that this movie is in some ways responsible for Madame Web.
Oscar escapes in a hot air balloon and gets whisked off in a tornado to the vibrant Land of Oz, where he immediately encounters a young witch named Theodora (Mila Kunis), who believes Oscar must be their Kwisatz Haderach, destined to become king when he slays the Wicked Witch. Greedy Oscar can’t pass up the chance to lord over a kingdom populated by hotties with gold to spare, so he lets Theodora and her sister, Evanora (Rachel Weisz), believe he’s a powerful wizard and agrees to kill the Wicked Witch for them. He’s joined on the journey by a living doll named China Girl (Joey King, who also plays the young girl in the wheelchair in the Kansas segment), and a flying monkey named Finley voiced by Zach Braff, who also plays Oscar’s put-upon assistant in the earlier sequence. Braff’s sycophantic doofus schtick is actually much more tolerable when he becomes a CG monkey.
And boy, does this film have entirely too much CGI. Though Raimi makes use of some practically built sets and human actors for the various denizens of Oz, there are entire sequences that look like a worse version of media that memorably combined live action with animation, like Paula Abdul’s “Opposites Attract” video, or Who Framed Roger Rabbit? An early scene of Oscar and Theodora running down and around the yellow brick road is particularly abysmal, to the point that I question what the critics who gave Oz a positive review were thinking in 2013 – maybe they were understandably taking it easy on Raimi, and though it’s hard to imagine now, it’s possible these effects looked much better in 2013. That said, Alice in Wonderland was and still is pretty hideous to look at, and Oz reheats much of those style elements (unsurprisingly, they share an art director).
Oz employs an exhausting classic trope when Oscar makes Finley promise not to tell Theodora that he’s not really a wizard, starting a ticking clock on the inevitable discovery and backlash. While Oscar is finding out that the so-called Wicked Witch is actually a lovely witch named Glinda (Williams again), and that Evanora is the real villain, Theodora learns that the man she fell in love with after spending all of an afternoon together is just a con-man, and even worse, he has the hots for Glinda. What follows is an all-timer of an unjustified meltdown, in which Evanora goads her sister into eating an enchanted apple and becoming so consumed by her jealous rage that she transforms into a green-skinned hag hellbent on revenge.
Not for nothing, Kunis provides Oz with moments verging on camp, with an outsized performance that gives the melodrama an entertaining quality. Take the transformation scene, one of just a few in which Raimi deploys his trademark style, with canted angles and jarring close-ups, combining the visual language of comic books and classic monster movies. He holds off on revealing Theodora’s new visage, focusing first on Evanora’s reaction. Weisz’s line reading of “Oh, sister. You’re hideous,” as simultaneously horrified and admiring might be the best acting in the entire film. When Evanora calmly offers to undo the spell, Theodora shrieks, “No! This is who I am now!” it’s impossible not to hear Meg Griffin.
Had Raimi minimized Oscar’s role and focused the story on the three witches alone, we might have something approaching the campy absurdity of The Huntsman: Winter’s War. Weisz and Williams are compelling if typecast in roles they could easily play in their sleep: Weisz as the confident, seductive sorceress opposite Williams as the breathy, effervescent heroine plucked from Hollywood’s Golden Age.
Making Oscar the focal point underscores the stupidity of Theodora’s outrage. All of that, for this guy? Oscar isn’t charming, he’s just an opportunist who relies on his ostensibly conventional good looks (your mileage may vary) to get what he wants. And what he usually wants is money, gullible women, and a life free of conflict or consequences for his narcissism. The closest cinematic comparison might be Forrest Gump, a movie that tries to pass off a mediocre white man’s conspicuous series of accomplishments as a moving underdog story about the resilience of the human spirit, or whatever. (In hindsight, Forrest Gump may rival Idiocracy in prescience.)
Oz the Great Powerful‘s third act finds Oscar on a redemption arc. Having fixed China Girl’s broken leg and made friends with the little flying monkey, Oscar endeavors to save Oz from the wicked witches, plural, by utilizing his sleight-of-hand skills and creating the illusion of power. This climactic sequence isn’t without flaws, but there are some interesting Raimi flourishes and one impressive effect: when Oscar projects his disembodied face in a cloud of smoke and fire, raining fireworks down on the evil sisters. So much of the film’s CGI is loud and garish, but this effect was clearly given extra care, and it shows.
The scene is punctured by Oz‘s second-campiest moment, which has been blessedly immortalized on YouTube:
Writing about it, Oz the Great and Powerful seems like it might be at least half of a good movie. But the experience of watching it is not nearly as enjoyable as I’ve (possibly) made it sound. Oz is a frustrating, tedious slog that places the burden of entirely too much plot on a horribly miscast James Franco, one of the least convincing actors of his generation, and one who works best in low-energy roles surrounded (and contrasted) by more skilled performers. With Oz the Great and Powerful, Raimi unintentionally made a movie that also works as a metaphor for the careers of Franco and other fruitless leading men, in which a mediocre guy fails upward, propped up and helped along by women who are much more talented and interesting.
- Release Date
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March 8, 2013
- Runtime
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130 Minutes
- Writers
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David Lindsay-Abaire, Mitchell Kapner, L. Frank Baum