Review: "Oz The Great and Powerful" smells strong but not in a good way

"Oz The Great and Powerful" PG
Sam Raimi of the Evil Dead movies and Spider Man tackles the prequel to the Wizard of Oz, a timeless classic from 1939 that essentially established the technicolor musical fantasy genre. Really if any company was going to do another Oz movie it would have to be Peter Jackson and Weta with someone else like Del Toro helming for it to even work, but they got Disney and not Jackson or Del Toro. They also had to pay some rights to Columbia that still holds most of the trademarks and didn't let them use 'flying monkeys' or 'Dorothy'.
     The plot is that it's 1905. The actor, Franco, can't really pull it off and his character is too young to be the man Dorothy will meet only 33 years later. Weizs and Klunis have fun playing dress up as witches, but Klunis is no green Wicked clone, not by a long shot. The circus scoundrel, Oz, is accidentally whisked to the magical kingdom by way of a hot air balloon in a tornado, where he encounters a land named for him in glorious color, and meets a smitten witch and her evil sister, who rule a castle of emerald called the Emerald City, which has yellow brick roads and goofy characters, and the guards a flying simians but not monkeys. The wicked sisters trick Oz into going on a quest to destroy their sibling, the white witch, who turns out to be good, and who convinces him to join her in a fight to reclaim the city, like something out of Lord of the Rings, only not nearly as cool, or Narnia, only a little less preachy.
     The story has a lot of dazzle and it has a cute subplot about a living orphaned china doll marionette, but it is lacking in the greatness department and doesn't have the charm or the essence of the original. The books were a nod to an election, as was the movie, and the characters timeless because they were archetypes of people which audiences related to. In this movie you don't ever relate to Oz or the witches, or even really the humans at all. The bellman monkey and the china doll could have been a story, and they're CG and puppets, but the humans are just meh, not interesting, and you don't feel for them or their plight, a bit like the Alice and Wonderland sequel from a few years ago.
     It's not that the movie is bad. The action and pacing are pretty nice, and it is a visually stunning thing, but there's no heart, like when the wicked witch turns. They should have made Oz less of an ass. They could have improved the story. It's like they just did it to cash in. It makes you appreciate and see the original again, which was a musical, even more.
     Worth a rental but not a special edition bluray. The extras wouldn't really be interesting.
Review by Adam Browne