Oz the Great and Powerful Reviews
Top CriticAn imaginative mix of live-action and CGI that pays homage to the iconic images and timeless sense of wonder in the classic The Wizard of Oz without being too deferential.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Oz the Great and Powerful is entirely serviceable family entertainment. Problem is, serviceable doesn't quite cut it when you're talking about the magical land of Oz.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Aside from a trio of witches that can hold its own with Eastwick's in the dishiness department, Oz the Great and Powerful is a peculiarly joyless occasion.
Let us take a moment to praise two great and surprisingly powerful characters: a winged monkey and a wee girl made out of china. Because so much human wonder resides in these two creations of make-up, puppetry, digital effects and lovely performances.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
The new Oz falls short of the 1939 Oz in charm and innocence, and certainly in songs. But as family entertainment, it's hard to fault such a rapturous spectacle and astute, suspenseful piece of storytelling.
Oz the Great and Powerful somehow manages to be both slavish to its hallowed template (when convenient) and completely tone-deaf to the magic that made it a one-of-a-kind cultural milestone.
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| Original Score: D
Raimi's film is supposed to be about magic, but magic is in scant supply.
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| Original Score: C+
"Oz the Great and Powerful" will likely dazzle family audiences while satisfying movie purists. Somewhere over the rainbow there may be a more magical movie, but this will certainly do.
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| Original Score: B
It's a journey of self-discovery, rife with movie cliches about believing in yourself, believing in your dreams, yada-yada.
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| Original Score: 2/4
Where's the gentle sentiment? The quiet moral lessons? The warm comforting message of family, and home, and realizing that the thing you needed most was really inside you, all the time?
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| Original Score: 2/4
Oz the Great and Powerful aims for nostalgia in older viewers who grew up on The Wizard of Oz and still hold the classic dear while simultaneously enchanting a newer, younger audience. It never really accomplishes either successfully.
A visually over-crammed, emotionally empty mega-spectacle on the model of Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland.
A partially effective jumble whose elements clash rather than cohere, this solid but not spectacular effort stubbornly refuses to catch fire until it's almost too late.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/5
The more you like the Judy Garland film, the more you might appreciate "Oz the Great and Powerful."
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| Original Score: 3/4
[Oz] qualifies as a cautionary tale, not about the perils of ambition and selfishness, but about the movie industry's misguided belief that it can distract the audience from a film's narrative weaknesses with little more than flash and spectacle.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1/4
Oz the Great and Powerful tells the story of how the Wizard came to Oz, answering a question I suspect no one was asking, but with considerable digital wizardry.
Relax, my pretties. "Oz the Great and Powerful" is a lollapalooza of funhouse thrills and visually sumptuous filmmaking.
... as limitless technology teaches the wizard about his own human limitations, Franco hits grace notes that let us see glimmers of how great and powerful this uneven Oz might have been.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
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?
You could easily see this playing as part of a double bill with The Wizard of Oz, even if the effects in Raimi's film often look cheesier than the ones in its 74-year-old predecessor.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
It's not like there's zero fun factor here, by a long shot - but the fun comes yoked to a long-winded and predictable story with lots of dead spots.
A reasonably smart, imaginative spin on the 1939 MGM classic.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Franco is, frankly, too callow, too feckless, too much the dude for this role.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
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.
A dispiriting, infuriating jumble of big money, small ideas and ugly visuals ...
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
An oppressive, bloated bore, the latest argument that CGI kills the imaginations of talented filmmakers.
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| Original Score: 1/4
Though Oz has some of the same narrative issues and effects-heavy bloat as that highly personal fantasy film, every frame is infused with a deep-rooted, impassioned understanding of the cinema's magical power to captivate and inspire.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
"Oz the Great and Powerful" isn't a masterpiece for the ages, but an agreeable family film that pleasantly reminds us of something greater - of a land that we heard of, once in a lullaby.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
I suspect there's just enough heart in this sleek Tin Man of a project to connect with an audience.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
It might have been more interesting if Raimi had attempted to shoot an "Oz" prequel using only the tools available to Victor Fleming and King Vidor in the late 1930s.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
The 3-D effects are plentiful - hats, lions, and baboons jump off the screen and into your lap - but the characters rarely lodge in the moviegoer's heart.
It's not bad. Some bits are enjoyable. But ultimately, other than some genuinely impressive visuals, it never makes a compelling-enough case to justify its existence.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
The new spinoff from L. Frank Baum's 1900 children's novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz may not be great, exactly, but it is powerfully entertaining.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
People just can't get enough of this stuff. To paraphrase Sam Goldwyn, include me in.
While [Raimi's] Oz is like retinal crack, he never seduces our hearts and minds.
Full Review
| Original Score: C+
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
Throughout, I longed for the Raimi of old-or even of 2009's deliciously gross throwback Drag Me to Hell ...
Rather than tell us that everything we know about Oz is wrong, the filmmakers take what we already know about the wonderful wizard and thread it into a tale about the magic behind cinema itself.
Director Sam Raimi's dull, kitschy and overlong patchwork is sadly an epic fail - despite the presence of Michelle Williams, Rachel Weisz and Mila Kunis as a trio of witches.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1/4
The raised eyebrows and slightly silly tone are all a little bit of a put on, but neither Franco nor anyone else goes full Depp in this one.
Full Review
| Original Score: B
Oz the Great and Powerful can be enjoyed, up to a point, on its own colorful, diverting but finally rather futile terms.
Quite the opposite of the great earlier film, the Oz here is a dull place to be. Given the choice, you might even consider going back to Kansas.
