Crafting an origin story for a character who doesn’t need one—and whose appeal in fact hinges, to a considerable extent, on his mysterious, inexplicable wondrousness—is not what one might call “pure imagination,” and yet here is Wonka, doing just that for Roald Dahl’s famed chocolatier, who became a pop culture icon courtesy of Gene Wilder in 1971’s Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. Paul King’s quasi-musical casts Timothée Chalamet as the young protagonist, whose adventurous attempts to make it in the candy business are the stuff of wholesale derivation, stitched together from innumerable superior films, not least of which is Mel Stuart’s (and, for that matter, Tim Burton’s 2005) predecessor. Unoriginal and ungainly at every turn, it’s a debacle devoid of any genuine magic.
Delivering more forced whimsy than both of King’s Paddington features combined, Wonka, which hits theaters Dec. 15, is, in form and content, a misbegotten hodgepodge that envisions Wonka’s early days through a painfully plagiaristic cinematic lens. Arriving on a ship from the African wilds where he was raised by his beloved late mother (Sally Hawkins), the twentysomething impresario lands in an unidentified city whose elaborately designed and embroidered architecture and décor recall Babe: Pig in the City by way of Amélie, Big Fish, Harry Potter, Peter Pan, and even Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium, the last of which is particularly galling given that it’s a second-rate Dahl knock-off. It’s in this bustling urban epicenter that Wonka plans to make his fortune, having always dreamed—thanks to his mom—of opening a shop in the same four-cornered Gallery Gourmet where the world’s finest chocolate is produced and sold.
The current titans of the sweets industry are Slugworth (Paterson Joseph), Ficklegruber (Mathew Baynton), and Prodnose (Matt Lucas), a trio whose villainous nature and dynamics have been modeled after the evil farmers of Fantastic Mr. Fox. They don’t take kindly to Wonka’s entrance on the scene, since he immediately wows the public with a delicacy that makes consumers literally take flight, and it’s hard not to sympathize with them, if only because as embodied by Chalamet, Wonka is a painfully affected showman in a ratty coat and matching top hat, from which he can procure all manner of objects like a magician. Chalamet makes exaggerated faces, his eyes go wide, and he prances about and spins his cane in a bouncy Wilder pantomime, but he constantly looks like he’s acting, and badly, rendering his turn (and the action) akin to the sort of parody one might find in a Hollywood satire or a Saturday Night Live sketch.
Wonka immediately winds up broke in this costly metropolis and, consequently, is tricked by mustached goliath Bleacher (Tom Davis) into signing a contract with his partner, dastardly Mrs. Scrubbit (Olivia Colman), in order to rent a room above her wash house. This nefarious duo seems to have stepped out of a corny Les Misérables adaptation, whereas the orphaned girl that Wonka meets in this establishment, Noodle (newcomer Calah Lane), appears to have materialized from Annie. In the basement where he’s forced to work as an indentured servant, Wonka befriends a motley crew of Scrubbit’s other funnily named victims—Abacus Crunch (Jim Carter), Piper Benz (Natasha Rothwell), Larry Chucklesworth (Rich Fulcher) and Lottie Bell (Rakhee Thakrar)—who eventually collaborate with him on a plan to sneak out of Scrubbit’s prison and make and sell chocolate that’ll earn them their freedom.
Although Wonka is ostensibly a musical, it ditches its song-and-dance formula during its second half—a move that speaks to the endeavor’s overriding clumsiness, if mercifully spares us more of Neil Hannon’s generic Broadway melodies. Similarly, a subplot about Noodle teaching the illiterate Wonka to read is introduced and then curtly resolved, as if everyone had second thoughts about wasting time on it. King crowds the frame with gadgets and gizmos and whirligigs galore, as well as with ornately decorative interiors and cityscapes that suggest Moulin Rouge! via Cats. Yet despite chocolate being the script’s main topic of conversation, the film is never delectably enticing; its focus is less on mouth-watering confections than on frantic fancifulness and lame humor, both of which combine in the figures of Rowan Atkinson’s corrupt cleric and Keegan-Michael Key’s chief of police, two baddies whose price for doing the bidding of Slugworth, Ficklegruber and Prodnose is, you guessed it, chocolate.
Syrupy sentimentality is the order of the day, absent any of the unnerving weirdness that Wilder and Stuart brought to Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. Chalamet’s entrepreneur is simply a good-hearted, preternaturally confident kid, and thus completely unconvincing as a milky younger version of Wilder’s bitter adult Wonka. Worse, he doesn’t mesh with the rest of the movie; whereas everyone else is at least on the same cartoony wavelength, the actor seems to be operating on a slightly different plane, incapable of hitting either his comedic or poignant notes. It’s a sizeable misstep for Chalamet, and that’s without even taking into account his so-so singing voice—a shortcoming that, in fairness, plagues everyone involved in this affair, which believes that vocal talent isn’t a prerequisite for belting out (admittedly unremarkable) show tunes.
“The greedy beat the needy,” says Noodle on more than one occasion but Wonka is about as class-conscious as your average Snickers bar, and Wonka’s desire to “change the world” comes off as similar feel-good pap. The sole time King’s film doesn’t make one furiously gnash their teeth is during Hugh Grant’s brief appearances as a CGI’d Oompa-Loompa named Lofty who has a long-standing grudge against the chocolatier. Grant’s “little orange man” is a posh gentleman with a thieving heart, and just bizarre enough to provide a bit of faint enchantment. No surprise that he’s relegated to a few sight gags and a late bit of phoned-in deus ex machina heroism. However, he remains, relatively speaking, more interesting than all of Chalamet’s wan eccentricity, Lane’s cherubic blandness, and the cavalcade of computer-generated giraffes, flamingos, and cocoa geysers that dominate the proceedings.
Aiming for delightfulness and coming up with merely strained triteness, Wonka reconfirms the reliable pointlessness of prequels and the inimitability of true classics. Like an unwanted box of Valentine’s Day treats, its destiny is to be put on a shelf and promptly forgotten.
