Wonka (2023)

PG, but the only real reason that it isn't G is because it's live action.  Like all family films, there's a little bit of peril for the protagonists.  The villains, rival chocolatiers, often try to kill Willy Wonka.  Also, there's just a handful of bad guys in the movie, but nothing that is honestly taken with a grain of reality.  Still, live action movies tend to be PG at bare minimum.

DIRECTOR: Paul King

My goodness, I wanted to like this movie. We have to establish some truths about me.  While I like the original Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory because I have a soul, it's not like the character of Willy Wonka is all that precious to me.  I didn't care for the Tim Burton / Johnny Depp version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.  But Wonka, somehow, has become something of a pillar of cinematic canon.  Other fact about me?  I like Timothee Chalamet because I think he's a talented actor, but I also think that casting tends to default to him too often.  This is going to play a part in my dislike for this movie.  Just know, as I stated earlier, that I really wanted to like this movie.

I never thought it was going to be great.  From the first images, I thought that Wonka was just going to be a movie that might have been aesthetically pleasing, but ultimately lacking any real charm of the original film.  Again, I wanted to be wrong.  I genuinely got excited when it hit Max because I knew that I would have a chance to watch it with the kids.  I also knew that Paul King had given us some of the best family friendly films of recent history and that, at worst, I'd get a solid Paul King movie.  Um...Wonka might have been worse than I thought when I started writing this.  The biggest problem of Wonka is that it's just a movie.  It's one of the movies of all time.  This movie was hyped up for a while.  Honestly, I don't know if that we ever really needed a Willy Wonka origin story.  Much like the James Franco prequel to The Wizard of Oz named Oz, the Great and Powerful, we got an origin story that no one was really asking for.  Origin stories are tough.  Most of the time, they aren't needed.  I'm not a fan of the Star Wars prequels. Solo: A Star Wars Story is fun, but completely unnecessary.  Heck, even Wicked, I like the music and the spectacle...but the story?  Meh.  Maleficent, same deal.

Honestly, Willy Wonka works better as the man behind the curtain.  We discover all that we need to about the character from the original film. He's a recluse whose enigmatic lifestyle is suited only for himself.  Part of the reality of the original film is that Willy Wonka is the quirky exception to a fairly mundane world.  Instead, Wonka offers a Roald Dahl fever dream where everyone is just a little bit Willy Wonka and Willy Wonka is the most joyful chocolatier that ever lived.  This is me saying what everyone else is saying about the movie too.  Timothee Chalamet's Wonka is no Gene Wilder's Wonka.  Gene Wilder's Wonka was a man who found joy in the death of spoiled children.  There's an implication that the kids didn't die in his factory, but there was never the guarantee that the kids didn't die in that tour.  There's a malicious glee in his eyes when terrible things happened to those children.  (I'll even go as far as to say that the original ending to Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory doesn't make a lick of sense because his character just shifts to like Charlie when he returns the candy.  Okay, okay, he forgives Charlie for his good deed.) 

The problem is...what is Wonka really saying?  It's almost revisiting a feeling more than it is actually offering anything new to the conversation.  I feel like I've written this phrase before and it's not a new idea, but I get that there really are no new stories.  It's something that I say, but don't really believe.  But Wonka, for being such a talked about movie, feels incredibly lazy as a story.  Golly, this movie jumps back to archetypes so hard that I don't know what to really say surprised me.  I used to write "paint-by-numbers" a lot in my blogs until I got called out on overusing it (Ironic, ain't it?).  There's a weird kismet to that debacle in Ireland with Willy's Chocolate Extravaganza and Wonka kind of having the same vibe.  I'm not accusing Wonka of being AI generated, but it also mind as well have been.  Both of these Willy Wonka-themed moments seem so uninspired by anything new that the concept of Willy Wonka is somehow tarnished by the existence of these things.  I'm being hyperbolic, but not by much.  I accused Rise of Skywalker of committing the worst crime a Star Wars movie could do: be just fine.  Wonka is on trial for the same crime.

The thing about a boring Willy Wonka property is that Willy Wonka is supposed to be marvelous.  There's always supposed to be a trick up his sleeve. He's the master magician in the form of a reclusive chocolate maker.  But there's nothing all that magical about Wonka. Wonka in this movie is quirky, but he rarely feels in control of his own world.  The consequence of that is that these moments where Willy Wonka pulls out some fantastical creation all feels neutered.  I'm trying to compare two parallel moments from the movies.  In Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, there's a candy that causes Charlie and Grandpa Joe to float to the ceiling.  Through belching, they come back down.  Wonka treats it as this thing that he's been honing for years and hasn't quite perfected.  It all feels like the obsession of a madman.  Wonka has a chocolate that, lazily, does the same thing.  It's a chocolate that causes people to fly around.  There's no real danger to the chocolate.   It just...exists.  Now, a scene where people started flying because they ate chocolate should be whimsical.  It just felt boring. It felt like the easiest magic that a movie could provide.

Maybe Willy Wonka doesn't need to have a whole franchise around him.  This is a movie that suffers from being an origin story and a wholly unnecessary origin story.  It's honestly pretty boring.  The performances are fine, but that's me being generous because I think that there's more that could have been done with the eponymous character.  I don't want to attack any of these people because I like all of the people involved.  But this movie was just...not good.