It’s an open secret that the first half of the stage version of Wicked is far superior to the latter. The initial few hours contain the best song and dance numbers (“Dancing Through Life,” “Popular,” “Defying Gravity”), more moments of chemistry between Elphaba and Glinda, and a relatively self-contained story about friendship and self-empowerment. The final stretch shifts gears towards a darker tone, with an equal amount of time allocated to supplementing the story of The Wizard of Oz as is spent on finishing this one.

Universal and producer Marc Platt’s film adaptation follows the same trajectory, with last year’s Wicked being given all the assets required to launch a multi-billion-dollar brand extension. The adaptations of the songs were catchy, and the casting of Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande as Elphaba and Glinda, respectively, created a match made in heaven. This time around, director Jon M. Chu is more concerned with not losing than winning, meaning that everything feels like the guardrails are up. He can’t roll a gutter ball, but he also can’t take much pride in rolling a ho-hum spare.

It doesn’t take long for the bleakness to bleed into Wicked: For Good, with the opening scene showing that the famous yellow brick road was not built through magic, but the blood, sweat, and tears of the animals that have been silenced by the so-called Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Jeff Goldblum). Elphaba, now dubbed the Wicked Witch of the West, continues her mission of exposing him as a fraud. But the propaganda arm of Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh) keeps the people of Oz in check, giving them an enemy to despise and a hero in Glinda to worship. Prince Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey) is the high school prom king to her queen, although his heart lies to the west.

Wicked: For Good is much plottier than its predecessor, with the bulk of the first act dedicated to reintroducing the characters and their situations. Screenwriters Winnie Holzman and Dana Fox focus their efforts on the ideas of authoritarianism and how people would rather be fed a comfortable lie than a thorny truth. It doesn’t take much of a leap of the imagination to draw the allegorical comparisons between the plight of the citizens of Oz and our real world. Although by extending that metaphor, Holzman and Fox display little respect for the common folk, perpetually having them mindlessly buy into whatever is thrown right in front of them. The ending is also ideologically backwards, leaving things on a morally muddled note.

And then there’s also the twists and turns that have to be made in order to get this pretzel into the eventual shape of The Wizard of Oz. The color of Nessa’s slippers turns to a ruby red, a house falls on someone, and a few characters have their anatomies changed to fit a few famous companions to Dorothy, who is never seen in close-up or from the front. The problem with this lore-centric approach is that the plot machinations of The Wizard of Oz are very low on the list of things that make it so special. It’s the succinct majesty around those moments that gives them their power. It’s a lot more fun to eat the sausage rather than see how it gets made.

Based on a few of his directorial choices, Chu seems to partially agree with that sentiment. The most magical moment of the film strips down most of Nathan Crowley’s sets and Paul Tazewell’s costumes, and just lets it two stars share a moment. Their rendition of “For Good” is sensational, delivering the emotional beat that had been missing for a large chunk of the lethargically paced 138-minute runtime. Grande is served more this time around, given a new solo number called “The Girl in the Bubble,” which unfolds in a (seemingly) unbroken take that emphasizes her wonderful voice. Erivo is often unfairly subjected to standing in front of giant, muddled green screens, and the rest of the supporting cast doesn’t have as much to work with.

Should a combined cut of the two films arrive at some point in the future, it would be a good idea for Chu (or any ambitious editor) to excise/condense much of this second chapter. That’s a bit of an insult, but this is still a very successful venture when viewed as a whole. It’s just a little hard to appreciate that fact at the moment. At least Wicked: For Good can take a great deal more pride in itself than the seemingly abandoned Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 2, whose only purpose is to be a lesson in how poorly this strategy of bifurcation can go.