'Wonka' is a Bad Movie That Makes Three Smart Choices
I didn't care for the Timothée Chalamet-starring prequel, but WB's Paul King-directed musical avoids a few key traps which often stymie IP revamps
No, Wonka isn’t an especially good movie. The songs are generic. The picture relies heavily on nostalgia for the 1971 Gene Wilder-starring Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory — including the original tunes — for emotional impact. Furthermore, Timothée Chalamet is miscast as the title character. He’s fine when he’s playing optimistic and sincere. However, he’s not the world’s best singer (no, he’s not Gerard Butler-in-Phantom of the Opera bad), and he feels off when he tries to sell the notion that Wonka is a disconcerting loon. It’s arguably a case of casting a flavor-of-the-month talent over the best (relatively famous) performer, akin to casting Ryan Reynolds — who could have played Wally West in his sleep — as Hal Jordan in Green Lantern. It’s another movie that repositions an iconic supporting character who was beloved for his somewhat off-kilter and potentially malevolent tendencies into a gee-whiz underdog. It’s also entirely harmless.
The Space Jam conundrum (since franchise films are far more common than they used to be, I’m harder on the tentpoles than I am on the smaller-scale, star-driven studio programmers) aside, it’s worth noting two things. First, it will probably play quite well with general audiences and families who merely view theatrical moviegoing as a recreational activity. That isn’t nothing in a world where every big theatrical release seems like life-or-death for the industry. Moreover, Paul King and Simon Farnaby’s screenplay makes three distinct artistic decisions that run comparatively against the grain in terms of what one might expect from these sorts of IP revamps. If the film legs out over the holiday season, and I’d be frankly shocked if it doesn’t both due to the above-noted factors and a lack of competition, it’ll partially be because the picture doesn’t get caught up in tendencies that have tripped over many would-be franchise starters in the last 15 years.
Timothée Chalamet *is* William J. Wonka right from the start
Whether you end up taking a fancy to this specific version of “young” Willy Wonka, and he’s certainly a “W.I.L.F.” for those so inclined, Timothée Chalamet appears on the scene from the get-go as a recognizable version of William J. Wonka. You don’t spend 80% of the runtime impatiently waiting for this version of the known character to become a recognizable incarnation — with recognizable personality traits and iconography — of the guy you know. He’s got the bubbly-weird sing-song personality, the iconic wardrobe (which makes him look like Gonzo from A Muppet Christmas Carol) and a firm ambition to make and sell chocolate to the masses. He’s immediately shown to be an uncommonly talented creator of delicious delights. Moreover, his arc in the film is not about him realizing he likes making chocolate and “becoming the Wonka” but merely about his struggles to do what he loves as a job.
This isn’t Blumhouse’s Jem and the Holograms, where the band only becomes Jem and the Holograms in the final scene. This isn’t like Guy Ritchie’s “part one of six” King Arthur and the Legend of the Sword, where Charlie Hunnam becomes King Arthur, declares all of his pals to be knights and starts building that Round Table. It’s not… three-and-counting Fantastic Four “part one” movies that all make the audience spend the entire running time watching Reed Richards and his “fantastic” family slowly get their powers, realize their destiny and finally become the iconic team for a sequel that (66% of the time thus far) would never come. This is contrary to 15 years of reboots that didn’t realize that Batman Begins and Casino Royale spent at least half their respective 140-minute runtimes with fully formed title characters embarking on their first big adventure. Wonka is less Tomb Raider and more Star Trek.
It’s a complete movie that actually ends
No spoilers, but Wonka does not end with A) Willy Wonka dying or B) the world coming to an end. If the film hits box office paydirt this season, WBD and Village Roadshow might produce Wonka 2: The Deadly Art of Illusion. However, this first film still functions as a singular, mostly stand-alone story that has a firm “happily ever after” conclusion to its respective plots and arcs. It’s not full of sequel teases or open questions, nor does it end on a glorified cliffhanger whereby audiences will have to hope that a second film provides a resolution. It is not a feature-length prequel to a long-running franchise that may never actually come to be. In short, warts and all, it’s a movie, one that stands on its own two feet and doesn’t treat its familiar IP as an excuse to give audiences only 3/4 of the story or 1/2 the journey.
Hollywood reacted to the successes of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and (especially) The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring by trying to pretzel every would-be “new” franchise into a potential trilogy. They produced a slew of open-ended (and thus unfinished) YA franchise-starters that didn’t even try to operate as stand-alone films. We saw copious “part one” films like The Force Awakens, Terminator: Genysis and The Amazing Spider-Man, which left out pertinent information and created unanswered questions to create the illusion of a mythology. Amusingly, the MCU rarely did this, with the first chapters of Iron Man, Doctor Strange, Ant-Man, Thor and Guardians of the Galaxy existing as mostly one-and-done stories. Sure The First Avenger ended with a man-out-of-time cliffhanger, which A) was an epilogue to a complete story and B) The Avengers already in production. I have no idea what a theoretical Wonka 2 will be. That’s refreshingly by design.
Willy Wonka is not a superhero
Again, without getting into spoilers, Willy Wonka is not revealed to be The Chosen One. He is not discovered to have been a descendant of a mysterious race of chocolate makers and thus destined to corner the marketplace in confectionary sweets. He cannot fly, he can’t see the future, and he is at no point rescued from peril via divine intervention or fate. Hollywood misinterpreted the success of The Avengers to mean that audiences wanted A) cinematic universes in the abstract and B) superheroes in the abstract. Over the last decade, we saw a wave of IP revamps — like a lot of the ones discussed above — which tried to refashion characters who were not caped crusaders into would-be action heroes who were chosen by fate and/or destined for greatness. Even non-superhero films like Mulan, Elvis and The Secret Life of Pets 2 tried to position themselves (or at least sell themselves) as theoretical superhero movies.
However, Willy Wonka is not special beyond his human-sized skill set and his human-scaled personality. While his love of chocolate and candy traces back to his relationship with his late mother (Sally Hawkins), he doesn’t want to build a candy store to save the world or stop a diabolical supervillain with plans of large-scale annihilation. There are diabolical villains and perilous plots, but the film doesn’t end with shootouts, fisticuffs or chases resulting in punitive violence. There’s also no giant light blasting into the sky, bringing about a potential apocalypse. In a world where most tentpoles are about literal superheroes or metaphorical one-man-armies (John Wick, Ethan Hunt, etc.), Wonka is just a regular working-class young adult who wants to earn money making and selling chocolate. Moreover, to paraphrase Batman Forerver, Wonka is Wonka not because he has to be, but because he chooses to be.
Epilogue
Come what may, Wonka is colorful and jubilant, with strong production design and a game-supporting cast (Calah Lane, Jim Carter, Hugh Grant, etc.). In terms of my critical disapproval, my biggest takeaway was how I wish this merely meh kid-targeted fantasy could merely exist as a fun time at the movies for kids as opposed to a big q4 tentpole which was expected to hold up not just Warner Bros. Discovery but the entire theatrical industry. In November of 1996, Michael Jordan’s Space Jam could be a weird, offbeat and openly kid-targeted IP exploitation that was a thing unto itself amid more conventional theatrical fare like Mel Gibson’s Ransom, John Travolta’s Michael and Tom Cruise’s Jerry Maguire. In July of 2021, LeBron James’ Space Jam: A New Legacy was A) the only game in town for most moviegoers and B) had the weight of the entire Covid-era theatrical industry on its shoulders.
It is dispiriting that, in 2023, an arbitrary prequel origin story born of IP for the sake of IP gets essentially extra credit for just being what used to be a movie. It gets “credit” for not crafting an intentionally incomplete narrative for the sake of theoretical sequels and for A) not turning its protagonist into an action hero and B) not trying to position itself as a metaphorical superhero movie. Yes, the best things about Wonka are essentially what it isn’t rather than what it is. However, its likely commercial success may show that Hollywood is realizing that the best way to challenge superhero tentpole domination (remember, this picture was announced in late 2016 when every hit for the first 3/4 of the year was a superhero movie or a talking animal toon) is to not be a superhero movie. It also has the year’s most realistic representation of human trafficking, but I digress.