Wonka review and star rating: ★★★★
Don’t take any notice of the saccharine posters for Wonka: the primary-coloured, heavily CGI’d images make this origin story look sugary-sweet. It is that, but it’s also much more. Bringing back one of Roald Dahl’s most famous characters is a formidable undertaking but Paul King and Simon Farnaby’s new universe does Dahl’s imagination justice.
In many ways, Wonka is the pristine golden ticket: sweeping musical numbers set in factories and workhouses where eccentric types produce chocolate or clean linen (wait and see on that last part). If you want to view paradise, you’re definitely in luck: plenty of wonderfully imaginative scenes paint a textured, mad backstory that goes beyond Wonka, leaning into some properly Dahl-esque arcs around rival chocolate maker Slugworth and his sidekicks Prodnose and Fickelgruber. It feels very Fantastic Mr Fox when we learn how the three have menacingly grouped together to get a leg up.
Chalamet has big shoes to fill. So how is he? Probably the most popular young actor of his generation, following Call Me Be Your Name and Dune, the 27-year-old French-American cavorts dutifully like his forefathers Gene Wilder and Johnny Depp (but mostly Wilder, who are we kidding?). All whimsical arm movements and pirouettes that somehow seem both stiffly awkward and free-flowing, Wonka is zany, and Chalamet nails his effervescence: though his chocolatier lacks the darkness intrinsic to the character. That’s not Chalamet’s fault – King and Farnaby could have lent more into Wonka’s demons to add depth to this family-friendly script. The end result is a chocolate maker without the creepiness lurking beneath the purple tailcoat.
He is a teenage Wonka who spends his time busking but with chocolate, dazzling huge audiences by displaying his delicious creations, some of which make people fly (in one of many homages to the classic Gene Wilder 1971 film, characters float up towards a glass ceiling). But Paterson Joseph’s Slugworth – a brilliant turn, all wide eyed like in the original film – finds Wonka’s fantastical creations a threat to his success and plans to thwart the dashing youngster’s rise.
There are some incredible supporting performances. Hugh Grant as an exiled Oompa-Lompa called Lofty is just wonderful madness. It’s obvious the actor gets a kick when he rips into himself, going full aristo by revealing his name is ‘Lofty,’ (spoken with true rahhh intonation), the tallest of the Oompa-Loompas. Rowan Atkinson is on autopilot as a corrupt priest taking chocolate bribes with Bean-era facial gymnastics, and Matt Lucas’ Prodnose gets the most hilarious lines of all. “We fart them out of our botties,” he says as he trumps his way to the roof in the flying scene. It has Little Britain energy without the punching down.
There are some fabulous songs too: you’ll be performing the rhyming couplets from the laundrette scenes for longer than it’d take to see off an Everlasting Gobstopper.
This Wonka is surprisingly inventive, with much more depth than Depp’s cold version, but its lack of tension won’t draw adults back time and time again like the original still does.
Wonka is released in cinemas on Friday 8 December
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