"Wonka" Tastes Like Stale Chocolate from Last Christmas
It makes too many basic technical errors, while being blithely unaware of its thematic contradictions
It only took about twenty minutes for me to begin scrutinizing “Wonka” carefully. I’m all too willing to give myself up to a movie-world, yet a bad movie will repeatedly keep me from immersing myself.
Such was “Wonka,” a musical prequel film that sings about pure imagination once again, as did the original 1972 film, yet it offers no surprises and few cinematic delights.
My scrutiny began with a CGI dog. They aren’t using real animals anymore, perhaps for legal reasons. So the CGI dog appears so that Wonka can put it in a perpetual-labor machine, freeing himself from such perpetual labor. Before that, the dog appears in a weird shot, barking at Wonka. The shot lasts a third of a second, as if the editors, cutting away so quickly from it, knew the computer-dog looked badly, like quite a bit of this movie.
Nothing in a “Wonka” movie should look poor. Yet in my theater at least, the film was exceedingly dim and dark, as if it were a historical drama or a noir. All of the color-palette explosions you are seeing in the movie’s trailer are all there are in the movie.
Oh, I forgot the plot. Young Wonka is effectively a sorcerer who is disallowed from selling his chocolate due to a corporate cartel, which controls a police state, and which is supported by the Catholic Church. We are shown that there are 500 monks and a hypocritical priest who harbor the corporate cartel underneath their cathedral. What the Catholic Church has to do with hindering the chocolate-shop trade is beyond me.
Wonka wishes to create a chocolate store in a swanky non-descript Euro city, but he mistakenly signs a contract with secret clauses that make him the indentured servant for life of two grubby inn-keepers. It’s an Oliver-Twist story, only if Oliver was a powerful magician who could escape whenever he wants to and can also make infinite food — which I guess would be the opposite of Oliver Twist.
So anyway, when Wonka first escapes, he break into a zoo to milk a giraffe.
The movie makes odd decisions to deal with a character who could easily be described as a corporate giant with strange labor practices who likely causes environmental hazards galore.
As I said, Wonka is a sorcerer. There’s no rags-to-riches story here, even though that’s the genre. “Wonka” essentially says that the naturally gifted are oppressed by big corporate-police-clerical institutions that keep them from being their own corporate behemoth, which you can be without struggling and working hard as an entrepreneur.
The movie, wrongly in my view, totally elides the arduous entrepreneurial endeavor necessary for Wonka to become who he becomes, in favor of just saying that Wonka is a being of infinite magic. You don’t need to work hard to make a good business; you just need to get “bad people” out of the way.
And then there’s the chocolate. “Wonka” makes a couple of fat jokes, and many of the candy inventions are essentially drugs that make people look silly. It waffles entirely on the complex nature of the substance that Wonka sells. The chocolate is so delicious that you will become an addict, which is bad, except that Wonka is good, so becoming a Wonka chocolate addict is good.
And nevermind where Wonka gets his materials, which involve stealing from native peoples and breaking into zoos as a robber, but again nevermind.
I shouldn’t complain about this movie’s lack of character development. And yet I just watched the magnificent “The Boy and His Heron,” a true work of pure imagination, which does not treat children as if they aren’t smart enough to figure out basic contradictions. “Wonka,” on the other hand,” deals in exaggerated character types that remain the same throughout. The plot goal is for Wonka, who is exactly who the Gene Wilder character is in the original, to overcome the villainous types. And that’s it.
The only good surprise is Hugh Grant as the one featured Oompa Loompa. He’s given nothing to do except a nonsensical goal of stealing Wonka’s candy because Wonka stole his people’s cocoa beans.
Anyway, the Oompa Loompa is pure fun, except he’s in the movie for five minutes. In the trailer I just watched of this movie, it shows *all* of his scenes and highlights. They made that trailer after the first one did poorly, I’m told. The second trailer is a blatant lie. It shows the ending of the movie several times and all the Oompa Loompa’s scenes. Yet that’s not what the movie is or looks like for most of its runtime.
That’s the state of big corporate movies, which “Wonka” has no clue that it is such. They lack imagination of the complex literary type, committing film-incest by pillaging original material and repeating it in a new package, selling an old decaying product as new, overhyping content in their marketing in order to allure.
“Wonka” should be a movie of boundless, unstoppable art, no less than what the Spiderverse movies and even the recent Puss-in-Boots sequel was. It’s not close to that, so its claims of bringing pure imagination to us are sham. I’m calling the Better Business Bureau on “Wonka.”