The star of Sam Raimi, once so radiant, seems inexorably on the wane. Nothing for four years after the lacklustre
Drag Me to Hell, and now an utterly pointless prequel to
The Wizard of Oz, which relies on reproducing elements of the original for all its best moments, such as the transition from black and white, small-screen Kansas to the technicolour and panoramic Oz via another tornado. This scene, in fact, crystallises all that is wrong with the concept: it is quite clear that Oz is a real place and not merely a wish-fulfilling product of the protagonist's feverish mind, and so a vital layer of the story is lost right at the start.
More is quite simply not more: as with George Lucas's ill-conceived revisits to the universe of his youthful imaginings, all sense of wonder is drowned under a wave of vexatious bluescreen fripperies and desperate CGI. The songs are forgettable, the origin stories of the wizard and witches uninvolving and new sidekicks invested with little character. A waste of both the talents of a respectable cast and an unforgivably large budget, resembling Burton's regurgitation of
Alice in Wonderland in not only its folly but even its look, with its failure to defile the memory of the classic source its biggest achievement.
3/10
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