‘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 prequel to the groundbreaking 1939 film, “Oz” can be very pretty but also overlong and repetitive, with a plot that’s more plodding that dazzling. Director Sam Raimi also is trying to find his own balance here between creating a big-budget, 3-D blockbuster and placing his signature stamp of kitschy, darkly humorous horror. He’s done the lavish CGI thing before, with diminishing results, in the “Spider-Man” trilogy, but here he has the daunting task of doing so while mining an even more treasured pop -culture phenomenon.
The results are understandably inconsistent. “Oz” features a couple of fun performances, a handful of witty lines, some clever details and spectacular costumes. And it’s all punctuated by a Danny Elfman score that serves as a reminder of how similar this effects-laden extravaganza is to the latter-day (and mediocre) work of Elfman’s frequent collaborator, Tim Burton  —  specifically, 2010’s “Alice in Wonderland,” also from Disney.

Miscast
At its center is a miscast James Franco, co-star of Raimi’s “Spider-Man” movies, as the circus huckster who becomes the reluctant Wizard of Oz. On the page (in the script from Mitchell Kapner and David Lindsay-Abaire), Franco’s selfish, scheming womanizer provides an early glimpse of the famous fraud that Dorothy Gale and her posse of new pals will go on to expose.
But Franco seems too boyish for the role; he’s neither charismatic nor self-loathing enough and his performance frequently consists of hammy goofing. So when his character does have a change of heart and decides to accept his destiny as a noble and inspiring leader, it rings hollow.
Before he gets there, though, he must journey through the Technicolor-tinted splendor of this wildly dreamlike place  —  much of which resembles one of those Thomas Kinkade paintings you’d see at the mall  —  not once but many times, which feels redundant.
But then again, so does the whole structure of the film itself.

Like Dorothy, Franco’s Oscar Diggs is whisked away from sepia-toned, rural Kansas of 1905 (projected in slightly boxier Academy ratio, a nice touch) through a tornado to the vibrantly hued, magical land that just happens to bear his nickname: Oz. Like Dorothy, he walks along the yellow brick road with some new companions.
“Oz the Great and Powerful” plays with the notion of making people believe through spectacle and trickery  —  that what you see is more important than what you actually get. It’s Oz’s bread and butter and it’s a primary tenet of the moviemaking process itself, of course. But this time, something is missing in the magic”.
“Oz the Great and Powerful,” a Disney release, is rated PG for sequences of action and scary images, and brief mild language. Running time: 130 minutes. Two stars out of four. (AP)
 

By Christy Lemire