IIt’s annoying to feel like you’re being held hostage by someone else’s nostalgia. The stage show Bad is loved by many; It’s been on Broadway for 20 years and it continues to grow, which means: lot of little girls and others have happily fallen under the poppy-induced spell of Winnie Holzman and Stephen Schwartz’s musical about the complex origins of the not-so-evil Wicked Witch of the West. Legions of kids and adults have listened and rapped along to songs like “Popular” and “Defying Gravity,” one a twinkling representation of what it takes to be the most loved girl in school, the other a spirited empowerment ballad about charting your own life course. The film adaptation of Bad– directed by John M. Chu and starring Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande – will expand the reach of the material, giving many more people the opportunity to fall in love with it. Or not.

It is the “or nots” who will likely be in the minority. But if you don’t feel Chu’s transforming magic Bad, there are some good reasons for that: the film is so aggressively colorful, so manic in its insistence that it’s okay to be different, that it practically mows you down. And this is just part one of the saga: the second part will be released in November 2025. Bad pulls off a distinctive but bleak magic trick: it turns the cherished Broadway memories of others into a long-lasting form of punishment for the rest of us.

Read more: Abort Bad‘s iconic songs with composer Stephen Schwartz

Bad the film is composed of many complex moving parts, and some work better than others. Grande plays Glinda, the Good Witch of Oz, but is she really that good? The backstory that will take up all two hours and 41 minutes of this film – about the same amount of time as the stage musical, although this is only the first half – almost proves the opposite. This is basically the story of Elphaba, played by Erivo, who at the beginning of the film is a reluctant young woman with dazzling supernatural powers. The problem is that she has green skin, which makes her a target for ridicule and ridicule, an outcast. Elphaba is a reinterpretation of the character first brought to life by L. Frank Baum in his extraordinary and wonderfully strange turn-of-the-century Oz books, and later portrayed in the revered 1939 film. Wizard of Oz by Margaret Hamilton. Bad– whose source material is roughly Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West– is built around the idea that Elphaba wasn’t born evil, but merely forced to make decisions that put her on a different path than that of the insufferable goody-two-shoes Glinda, her enemy-turned-enemy-turned-friend. The subtext of the story – or rather, its strikingly daring nature – is that we are all shaped by our choices, which are at least partly determined by our response to the way others treat us.

But you’ve probably recovered Bad not because of the grueling life lessons, but because of the songs, the lush, flashy sets, the chance to see two formidable artists parry and spar. Grande brings a not-obnoxious powder room parity to the role of Glinda: as the film opens, she enters Oz’s Shiz University, an institution whose radically uncool name will unfortunately forever tarnish the classic and vaguely scatological phrase “It’s the shizz” . ” Shiz is the place where kids learn magic spells and stuff; Glinda arrives with a million pink suitcases and thinks she will be the best student.

Not so fast: Elphaba has also arrived at school, but not as a student. She’s only there to drop off her younger sister Nessa Rose (Marissa Bode). Their father, Governor Thropp (Andy Nyman), has hated Elphaba since the day she was born. Remember, she’s green and so different– while being in love with Nessa Rose, who, admittedly, is so kind and sweet that it’s impossible not to love her. In fact, Elphaba is very fond of her. And the fact that she uses a wheelchair makes their father all the more overprotective of her. But as Elphaba tries to get her younger sister settled in Shiz, her fantastic powers – they flow from her like electricity, especially when she is angry or frustrated – attract the attention of the school’s superstar professor, the cold, elegant Madame Morrible ( Michelle Yeoh). Morrible immediately enrolls Elphaba in Shiz University, making her the unwanted roommate of Glinda (who at this point is named Galinda, for reasons the movie will explain if you’re curious, or even if you’re not).

Glinda has no need for Elphaba and goes overboard to make her Shiz experience unbearable. She relegates her roommate to a small, dark corner of their shared room and literally crowds her with mountains of frippery and furbelows, mostly in vibrant shades of pink. In a pivotal scene, she tries to humiliate Elphaba at a school dance but inexplicably softens; the two almost become friends. But there’s always an undercurrent of competitiveness: Glinda isn’t half as gifted as Elphaba, and she’s the opposite of down-to-earth. Grande has fun with Glinda’s sweet, exaggerated manipulations: she has the fluttering eyelids of a blinking doll and the spinning elegance of a ballerina with a music box. But her shtick is getting tiresome. There is so much winking, whispering and pushing Bad that I came out of it with a sense of gratitude – if only temporarily – for the stark ugliness of reality.

There are so many characters, so many plot points, so many metaphors Bad– they look like a traffic jam of flying monkeys. Jonathan Bailey plays a wealthy, handsome prince who, upon his announced arrival at the school, instinctively takes a liking to Elphaba, but eventually falls into a committed relationship with Glinda, who practically hypnotizes him into obedience. Jeff Goldblum plays the Wizard of Oz, a lanky charmer who can be a jerk at best and a puppet of fascists at worst. Peter Dinklage provides the voice of a beleaguered professor-goat at the school, Dr. Dillamond. Oz is a community where animals can talk; they are as intelligent as humans, or even more so, and they mingle freely in society. But someone in Oz is trying to stop all that by launching a campaign to silence all animals, and Dr. Dillamond becomes their unfortunate victim.

In the meantime the big message came from Bad“No one is all good or all bad” flashes so offensively that you’re not sure what it all means. Metaphorical truths are thrown around knowingly: it’s okay, even good, to be different! Those who know best will always be the first to be silenced! The popular girl doesn’t always win! It is tempting to interpret Bad as a wise lesson in civic responsibility, a fable for our time, but its ideas are so slippery, so easily adaptable to even the most short-sighted political views, that they have no real value. Meanwhile, there are as many song and dance numbers as you could want, and possibly more. Chu – also the director of Crazy rich Asians And In the Heightsboth films are more fun than this one – it stages it lavishly, to the point where your ears and eyeballs wish it would stop.

And yet: there is Erivo. She is the only force that comes in Bad so I didn’t feel ground to a core. As Elphaba, she channels something like real pain instead of just showing self-pity. You sympathize with her in her greenness, in her continued state of being an outsider, in her frustration at being underestimated and unloved. Erivo almost rises above the material, and not just on a broomstick. But even she isn’t strong enough to counter the cyclone of entertainment with a capital E swirling around her. For a film whose main song is an advertisement for the joys of defying gravity, Wicked is surprisingly leaden, with the promise of more of the same to come. The shizz isn’t it.