Oz the Great and Powerful Reviews

Disney's extravagantly flashy "Oz the Great and Powerful" all but snuffs out the horsefeather magic and carnival heart that provides what little enchantment the film conjures.

Full Review | Original Score: **1/2

While it's not the embarrassment to MGM's cherished, bank-holiday classic that you might have feared, Oz The Great And Powerful is more flat and plodding than it is great or powerful.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5

"Oz" suffers from a gluttonous use of CGI and an incredibly weak story, but the biggest problem is James Franco as the titular character.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/10

The film's CGI'd talking monkey is more alive than Franco. And it totally looks fake.

Full Review | Original Score: C-

If I see "Oz" on the poster then I expect something "great and powerful", and "acceptable" just won't cut it.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.9/5

Just like Dorothy's technicolour journey before, this trip through Oz is once again smeared by this ill deserving charlatan.

Full Review | Original Score: 1/5

A prequel that plays out like fan fiction written for Playboy magazine. It succeeds with a little nostalgia but it's mostly a complete abomination

Full Review | Original Score: 1/5

An amorphous melange of ill-fitting reference points and misappropriated aesthetics, a lumbering family blockbuster both tiresome and wholly indistinct.

Full Review | Original Score: .5/4

What it lacks, rather like Oscar himself, is any authentic magic: the script's post-'Shrek' wisecracks feel especially out of place, and the over-processed digital landscapes can't match the beauty of handmade Hollywood artifice.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5

Did anyone watch the 1939 movie and say, "it was good but I'm not satisfied that I know enough about the Wicked Witch of the West's early years"?

Full Review

Sam Raimi made his first feature film, The Evil Dead, for $90,000. Now he has made Oz The Great and Powerful - a prequel to The Wizard of Oz - for 2,222 times that. The result is a thousand times less entertaining.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/5

Sam Raimi brings the jokey, adolescent sensibility of his Drag Me to Hell to this lavish Wizard of Oz prequel, and the result is as unshapely as that premise would suggest.

Full Review

This film never quite decides if it wants to be parody, comedy or fantasy. The result is a smug, overly ornamented amalgam of all three.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4

Better than [Tim] Burton's dull acid trip down the rabbit hole, but that's not saying much.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5

Oz remains a calculated studio endeavor, filled with awkward shifts between simple-minded humor, gooey sentimentality, lavish effect sequences and move-it-along storytelling.

Full Review

What does it say about "Oz the Great and Powerful" that China Doll, a creature born of digital code, is the movie's most affecting character?

Full Review

All four principals and their director Sam Raimi emerge no worse off for the experience, but nor do they cover themselves in any type of ground-breaking glory.

Full Review

As awful as the movie is, at least there is one truth that it gets just right. Witches be crazy.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/4

A flat screenplay and a miscast Franco render Oz a deep bore - at best a buffoon, at worst a creepy sexual predator.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5

You won't want to return to this Oz.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5