63: WANKA

 

Starring: Timothee Chalamet, Calah Lane, Keegan-Michael Key, Paterson Joseph, Matt Lucas, Mathew Baynton, Sally Hawkins, Rowan Atkinson, Jim Carter, Tom Davis, Olivia Colman and Hugh Grant. 

Written by Simon Farnaby and Paul King. Directed by Paul King. Budget $125 million. Running time 116 minutes.

Just like the poster for the film (see above) this is a sickly sweet, over sugared confectionary of a movie that will leave you feeling nauseous from the visual overload and bombarded by a parade of instantly forgettable musical numbers, because make no mistake, this is a MUSICAL, in tooth and roar. Not even the severely under-used Hugh Grant, the films MVP, can save this from slowly melting into a overlong slog of generic panto-like story tropes and plot points, despite the extremely talented cast of British comedians in all the back-up roles giving it their damdest! 

Game Timothee Chalamet presents us with a doe-eyed, innocent, and illiterate Wanka still grieving the death of his mother many years earlier and setting out into the big wide world to open up his very own chocolate shop right in the middle of a fabulous shopping arcade directly opposite a cartel of three highly ruthless, greedy and murderous chocolate moguls played by Paterson Joseph as Arthur Slugworth, Matt Lucas as Prodnose and Mathew Baynton as Fickelgruber. Together with the corrupt police captain, Keegan-Michael Key they try to at first intimidate Wanka before just giving up and just trying to murder him. 

The plot see Wanka get off a ship, make his way into the big city, only to end up penniless and the victim of a scam that sees him imprisoned in a guest house run by Olivia Colman and Tom Davis. There Wanka meets up with the other members of this rapidly expanding cast and devises a plan to escape, free the other prisoners, capture the baddies and punish the guilty. Oh, and find out who the young orphan girl Noodle, Calah Lane, is. Added to Wanka's To-Do-List, is find out who's the short orange creature sneaking into his room at night and stealing all his chocolate might be. Oh, wait he also has to build his chocolate empire and fulfill a dream his mother gave him. So it's amazing to think he and everyone else has any time at all to launch into a string of instantly forgettable and generic new songs and a couple of classics from the original and vastly superior movie starring Gene Wilder that this film oh so desperately wants to be seen as a worthy successor to. But find the time they do, and you'll be wishing they hadn't by the end of this.

Paul King directed the infinitely better and vastly superior Paddington films and it was this fact alone that drew me all in. Those two films were a delight, a funny, delightful and utterly British affair that lifted one's spirits and left you with a spring in your step. This not so, it starts promisingly and the effervescent and charming Chalamet leaps and dances into the fray, but as the film builds up its massive backstory and plot structure to support the final showdown and the setting of wrongs it becomes bogged down, scenes build to big song and dance numbers and the three act structure which sees our hero defeated and lost at the end of the second act is strongly in place and happy to provide all the tried and tested tricks of Syd Field's classic structure. 

There's a glimmer of hope right at the very end of the film where Wanka and the Oompa Loompa begin to build the famous chocolate factory and you wish the film had started there, rather than an earlier.

For me, the main failing of the film is the introduction of magic into the proceedings, something missing from the original. Here everything that Wanka creates has an element of the magical as part of the ingredients, all clearly inspired by the Hairy Potter films, and this I would argue robs the film of the actual magic of the first. Magic, like Star Trek science is just a lazy device that enables the writer to reverse the polarity of the proton fandango whenever it suits the situation. 

In the original film, it's shown that Wonka is a true chocolate scientist constantly experimenting with unusual ingredients to create new taste sensations, here, Wanka just chucks in the wings of a flying beetle so the eater can fly. Also, as someone who eats chocolate, it's bizarre to see everyone in this film never savouring the chocolate but just crunching into it and munching it in one go, just like you would chomping down on a block of Dairy Milk, happy knowing you've still got a kilo to go. 

There's also a distinct lack of the malevolence of Roald Dahl in the writing, everything here is twee and far too nice, even the baddies are sweet and no one dies horribly. And once again we've been given the origin story of a character which gives us nothing new, and only diminishes the character in question by piling on un-needed emotional baggage.

It's not a terrible film, it's just far too sweetly sick, it's just like Easter Sunday morning where the sight of all your chocolate eggs piled high looks absolutely wonderful but the feeling after you've polished off five kilos of the chocolate goodness or this will leave you craving something more substantial and meaty.

6/10