‘Wonka’ Review: Timothée Chalamet Makes a Winning Willy Wonka in a Fun Prequel That’s One of the Squarest Movie Musicals in Decades
variety.comOwen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Every fan of “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” (1971) loves the scene where Gene Wilder, as the mystical candy maker, takes his guests on a psychedelic tunnel ride, zooming through the bowels of the Chocolate Factory as he chants a little verse (“There’s no earthly way of knowing, which direction we are going…”), getting angrier and more hysterical by the second.
Wilder’s Wonka was a sweetheart, but he had a hidden maniacal side. And in “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” Tim Burton’s majestically wacked 2005 remake, Johnny Depp, then at the apex of his movie stardom, went full Depp, playing Wonka like some louche vampiristic cross between Anna Wintour and Michael Jackson.
But in “Wonka,” the fun, rousing, impeccably staged, jaw-droppingly old-fashioned musical prequel to the legendary Roald Dahl tale, Timothée Chalamet plays the title character as the beaming soul of effervescent goodness.
His chocolate passion is there (he’s all but defined by it), but the kinks are gone; so is any trace of a dark side. Willy, a young man of about 25, arrives in London after seven years of sailing around the globe, during which he was scouring obscure lands for the rare delicacies that will give his candy its transcendent tastiness.
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