Starring James Franco, Michelle Williams, Rachel Weisz, Mila Kunis
Directed by Sam Raimi
Even Sam Raimis greatest admirers would be hard-pressed to claim that the geeky filmmakers instincts are infallible. After all, this is a man who took Spider-Man 3s $250-million budget and delivered a bloated excuse for a blockbuster bogged down with cringe-worthy dance sequences and dreadful adversaries.
After getting back to his roots with the splatstick Drag Me to Hell, he now returns to the big leagues with this opulent prequel to The Wizard of Oz.
Despite Disneys considerable financial backing, what actually fuels the film is Raimis ability to rekindle the same scrappy resourcefulness that allowed him to make The Evil Dead, a certified cult classic, for little more than pocket change.
Raimis ingenuity can also be glimpsed in Oscar Diggs (James Franco), a low-rent circus magician in 1905 Kansas. When a familiar tornado whisks him off to Oz, hes able to use his parlour tricks to convince the unstable witch Theodora (Mila Kunis) that hes the great wizard the wonderlands been waiting for.
When Oscar soon teams up with the good witch Glinda (Michelle Williams) instead, the jilted, suddenly green-skinned Theodora and her manipulative sister Evanora (Rachel Weisz) raise PG-rated hell kicking off an epic brouhaha featuring Munchkins and flying monkeys.
While the story here is as simple to follow as a yellow brick road, Raimi executes it with panache, offering touching callbacks to earlier plot points, clever tributes to the 1939 classic, a moral for the kids (goodness trumps greatness), and an astonishing climax thatll remind every movie-lover of the awe they experienced when they first encountered the silver screen.
