Warner Bros.
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.