dir. Taryn O’Neill
Passionflix’s Wicked somehow manages to be so generic and so derivative that it becomes its own bizarre phenomenon. Tropes are shamelessly stolen from pretty much all fantasy stories ever: as our heroine Ivy battles nefarious beings in the night, it’s an obvious attempt to emulate Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Her burgeoning romance with the extremely underwhelming Ren echoes the plodding, toxic, idiotic love story of Twilight (and its many, many spawned YA atrocities). Ivy’s very status as the chosen one, a hybrid of humans and a mythical race, is one of the most tired fantasy clichés there is. But somehow, Wicked is so atrocious as to not be another boring, forgettable YA fantasy. The dreadful CGI; pathetic action scenes that resemble parkour more than combat; talk of fae and ancients and brownies in a desperate attempt at world-building; all-powerful supernatural entities who eschew their magical powers to just use guns instead: Wicked is genuinely a brimming bucket of laughs, even if it wasn’t attempting to be.
BMDb 