Wonka (2023)

Review: written Dec 2023

Sweet and fantastic, adding new flavour to the Wonka story

I was certainly not yearning for another movie resurrecting Roald Dahl’s popular character from “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”.. and yet, now that it has come along, I rather enjoyed it.

The director of Paddington brings that same balance of the fantastic , the sweet, the heartwarming, with just the right balance of menace, danger and Dickensian style threat.

It starts with the wide eyed and ambitious Wonka arriving in town to establish his dream of ranking alongside the most famous chocolatiers in the land. Virtually penniless by the end of the first song, you know he is going to have an uphill battle. The chocolatiers are less than happy when they see the magical effects the young upstarts confections have, literally raising the challenge to new heights.. and Wonka soon finds himself in Olivia Colman’s grim laundrette as a pauper. Success will be an uphill struggle, but with milking giraffes, ballooning Chief of police, Hugh Grant’s singing Oompa Loompa and a cast that are clearly all relishing the almost panto like roles, you know it’s going be an enjoyable and fantastical ride.

Timothée Chalamet has some big shoes to fill, but as this is a prequel, his wide eyed youthfulness and profound sense of optimism and hope, work. When I watched the Gene Wilder version, the character of Wonka was actually quite scary and ambiguous – look what he seemed to allow happen to those kids! Here, the character is much more stratightforwardly appealing, and the grimness is found elsewhere. Olivia Colman in particular has a blast as the scheming hotelier / laundrette owner.

By the end of the first song, I realised the fact it’s a musical wasn’t going to bother me… and if I missed the sense of ambiguity of Wilder’s performance, there’s enough menace elsewhere to mostly offset that.

Paul King and Simon Farnaby have crafted a thoroughly enjoyable romp then, maybe not as magical as the original movie, but definitely superior to the Depp version. Not a movie I thought was needed, but actually I’ll give it the most appropriate praise I can think of – Roald Dahl would have approved.