One can understand how there was great material to be mined from origin stories of iconic movie characters ranging from Anakin Skywalker to Batman to Hannibal Lecter to Vito Corleone to Cruella de Vil — but Willy Wonka? I’m not so sure there was a steady drumbeat for a prequel about the Roald Dahl character who first appeared in the 1964 novel “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” was memorably portrayed by Gene Wilder in the 1971 film and resurfaced in that bizarre Johnny Depp/Tim Burton movie from 2005.
Where did the smiling but kind of sadistic and creepy and manipulative and exploitative Willy Wonka come from? Do we care?
Maybe there IS a story here, but with “Wonka,” we get an intermittently entertaining but scattershot effort with an underwhelming performance by Timothée Chalamet in the title role, production values that often fail to deliver the appropriate level of “Wow!” and a meandering script that veers between maudlin, cheap and just plain weird for weird’s sake. Despite the best efforts of the talented director/co-writer Paul King (who gifted us with the “Paddington” movies) and the wonderful ensemble cast, “Wonka” is like one of those enticing-looking chocolates with a smooth and silky and delicious coating — but inside, you taste dry coconut instead of caramel or a cherry, what a bummer!
“Wonka” takes place in an undefined time and place that resembles early 20th century England. Chalamet’s Willy, an irrepressible and naïve and exuberant young man who is almost annoyingly upbeat, arrives in town having traveled the world for years, honing his cooking skills and gathering the finest and rarest of ingredients for the most wonderful, amazing, incredible chocolates you’ll ever taste.
Chalamet proves himself to be light afoot and rather thin of voice as Willy dazzles the locals with a demonstration of his affordable and magical creations, much to the harumph-harumph-overacting dismay of three greedy chocolatiers with cartoonish names and a cartoonish level of villainy: Slugworth (Paterson Joseph), Fickelgruber (Matthew Baynton) and Prodnose (Matt Lucas).
While the evil trio conspires with the corrupt, chocoholic chief of police (Keegan-Michael Key) to prevent Willy from setting up shop, Willy has a whole other set of problems to contend with, courtesy of the monstrous innkeeper Mrs. Scrubit (Olivia Colman) and her equally grotesque henchman, Bleacher (Tom Davis). (We almost expect to hear “Master of the House” from “Les Miserables” when this pair takes center stage.)
You see, on Willy’s first night in town, he was tricked into signing an agreement that effectively imprisons him at the inn as unpaid slave labor for the next 20 years, toiling away in the laundry house alongside a bevy of colorful characters who have also been duped. They include the telephone operator Lottie Bell (Rakhee Thakrar), the plumber Piper Benz (Natasha Rothwell), the terribly unfunny aspiring comedian Larry Chucklesworth (Rich Fulcher), the accountant Abacus Crunch (Jim Carter) — and the plucky young Noodle (Calah Lane), who becomes Willy’s partner as they sneak out of the prison/inn and go on a variety of adventures that include borrowing a giraffe from the zoo to help them break into the villains’ secret lair, which is hidden beneath a cathedral run by a chocoholic priest (Rowan Atkinson).
Along the way, we learn that Willy doesn’t know how to read, that Willy is haunted by the memories of his dead mom (Sally Hawkins) and that Willy is engaged in an ongoing battle with an Oompa Loompa (a disturbingly miniaturized, orange-faced Hugh Grant) who keeps stealing Willy’s chocolates as a form of revenge. Oh, and that police chief keeps accepting copious amounts of chocolate as bribes, resulting in a steady barrage of borderline tasteless obesity jokes as the chief balloons to the point where it appears he might just burst.
And if we don’t have enough subplots already, there’s a whole thing about Mrs. Scrubit getting tricked into believing the heathen Bleacher is actually of Bavarian aristocracy, resulting in a romantic coupling played for mostly nonexistent laughs.
The good stuff: Chalamet and young Calah Lane have a sweet, older-younger sibling chemistry, and the new musical numbers from Neil Hannon of The Divine Comedy are passably pleasant, though none are as memorable as the reprisals of “Pure Imagination” and “Oompa Loompa” from the 1971 film. Still, as the story drags on, “Wonka” gets stuck in its own gooey, convoluted aimlessness. We have, what, seven villains? There’s the trio of chocolatiers, the police chief and the priest, plus Scrubit and Bleacher. At times it feels as if the filmmakers are frantically spinning plates, trying to keep everything in motion, at the expense of warmth, wit and … pure imagination.
