Wonka
Willy Wonka gets an origin story with mixed results in director Paul King's musical Wonka.
A young Wonka (Timothee Chalamet) moves
to a fictional city (it's a hybrid of multiple European destinations) with the
goal of selling chocolate. He runs into obstacles including the sinister local
chocolate cartel. His inability to read the fine print when signing a one-night
lease on a room ends up making him an indentured servant for a sinister
landlady (Olivia Colman).
Wonka does some things well. It
gets the whimsical, slightly surreal tone right. The scenes depicting Wonka's
relationships with his fellow indentured servants, most prominently an orphaned
girl (Calah Lane), are good. The reliably funny Hugh Grant gets laughs as an
Oompa Loompa.
On the negative side of the ledger, the
musical numbers are uniformly meh. Whenever a musical number starts, the movie
comes screeching to a halt. The story also owes a fairly major debt to 2021's
superior Cruella (origin story about a newcomer who tries to get a
toehold in a business dominated by local tyrants, a climactic heist). But one
of many ways Wonka falls short of Cruella is no one in the cartel
is as fearsome (or funny) a villain as Emma Thompson was.
But that said, Wonka is a
pleasant enough way to pass the time for families looking for an afternoon at
the movies.
