Imagine my surprise when it turned out that Wonka exceeded my expectations, serving up an entertainment I didn't mind sampling.
Director Paul King bolsters his movie with a strong supporting cast. (More about that later.) King also refuses to wink at the audience as a way of demonstrating superiority to the material at hand.
Look, if you’re going to make a movie such as Wonka, you better go all in -- particularly in a version that strips away some of Dahl's wickedness.
Chalamet approaches the role of Willy with a cheerleader’s gusto, never embarrassing himself by singing in a role played by Gene Wilder 1971. Jim Carrey offered his version of Wonka in 1995, followed by Johnny Depp, who starred in director Tim Burton’s 2005 version.
Chalamet keeps the movie on track with help from an old-pro cast that includes Hugh Grant as the eight-inch tall Oompa-Loompa, Sally Hawkins as Willy's mother, and Olivia Colman as the devious Mrs. Scrubbit.
It’s a relief to see Colman in a role that doesn’t demand that she turn herself inside out. She has fun, even if she’s playing a warmed-over version of a character Dickens might have written, an ogre of a woman who uses faux kindness to lure and exploit the vulnerable.
The story begins when Willy arrives by ship to start a chocolate business in a city in which chocolate seems to serve as one of its currencies. Willy quickly goes broke and falls under the sway of Mrs. Scrubbit and her gap-toothed henchman (Tom Davis).
Promising food and lodging, Mrs. Scrubitt connives to force Willy to spend 15 years working in her laundry, her way of making him pay off a ludicrously inflated debt.
In the laundry, Willy meets Abacus Crunch (Jim Carter), another of Scrubbit's indentured servants and, most importantly, Noodle (Calah Lane), a girl who'll help Wonka achieve his chocolate dream.
King's origin story also pits Wonka against the town's chocolate cartel led by Slugworth (Joseph Paterson). A happily corrupt police chief (Keegan-Michael Key) helps to upend Wonka's goal: to make the world's best chocolate.
Early on, we learn that Wonka’s chocolate has exceptional kick; in some versions, it even makes people levitate, floating into the air like helium-filled balloons in a holiday parade.
I don't know if you'll be humming any of the songs on the way out of the theater, but this unashamedly corny Wonka surpassed my hopes. I ask for no more.
King (who directed the Paddington movies) has made an old-fashioned entertainment that, at least for me, warded off bad vibes and didn't give me tooth decay. Consistent with a fanciful approach, the subject never arises, despite Wonka's copious flow of candy.
An addendum: Sporting a green wig and orange skin, Grant scores as the tiny Oompa Loompa. Grant turns himself into a kind of special effect. Say what you will, it’s better than another romcom.
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