Wonka Review

In complete honesty, Wonka was not a movie that I looked forward to. The trailer, the lead - hell, the entire concept - didn't sit well with someone who really loved Dahl both as a kid and as an adult (if you think Dahl wrote just for kids, please look up his macabre adult fiction and his two autobiographies - the man lived a really eventful life as an RAF pilot during World War II). Anyway, I digress - the point was that Wonka was a movie I walked into with some trepidation, and was pleasantly surprised.

Director Paul King is no stranger to the whimsical and fantastical, having directed the wonderful Paddington The Bear movies. His last movie, Paddington 2, has especially gained a cult following among audiences - while also making good at the box office.

Willy Wonka (Timothée Chalamet) is a young, hopeful, bright-eyed man on a journey to realise his dream of being a chocolatier in a city renowned for its chocolate, a dream his late mother shared: "When you share chocolate with the world, I will be right beside you."

Of course, reality is seldom so straightforward, and Wonka must outsmart a manipulative chocolate cartel that is not so keen on new entrants into their area of business. Along the way, Wonka makes more enemies, but also a bunch of new friends - will they help him achieve his dreams?

Wonka is the origin story of the character of Willy Wonka, based on the classic Roald Dahl story, Charlie And The Chocolate Factory. The darker overtones of the original Dahl story are very much underplayed in this film (and are pretty apparent in the two other screen adaptations of the story). What makes Wonka interesting is that it stands up as its own story - we get a new tale featuring new characters in a setting that is quite different to the one in Dahl's story. There are a couple of sub-plots in the movie (that tie in together quite nicely in the end) - one featuring indentured servitude followed by a subsequent prison break from evil innkeeper Mrs Scrubbit (Olivia Coleman), and the other featuring the Oompa Loompa Lofty (Hugh Grant) who is on his own journey of redemption.

Wonka has a vibe similar to that of Paddington 2 - lovable characters and wholesome humour with a dash of the outlandish. While it retains the same quality fantastic sets, special effects and cinematography that help sell the fantasy of it all, Wonka has an ace up its sleeve - it is a musical! Normally musicals do little to impress most Indians because most movies here would qualify as musicals, at least from a Western perspective. Wonka seems like a movie where the musical setups would feel at home in an Indian production with their elaborate scale and grand designs. It is an interesting insight into how song-and-dance sequences can be done in a way so similar to yet-so-different from what we're used to in Indian cinema.

The last, but certainly not the least, thing that surprised me was the emotional punch a film that is mostly a comedy can pack. It is done subtly, within familiar themes like getting closer to your family or rediscovering lost connections, but it makes the audience feel in a way not many expect.

Timothée Chalamet is in superb form as the titular Willy Wonka, charming his way through the entirety of the film's 2-hour running time. Wonka works as a film in no small part due to Chalamet's lead act - and he shows why he is one of the most talked-about leading men in Hollywood right now. An able supporting cast surrounds Chalamet, with Olivia Colman and Rowan Atkinson delivering most of the laughs with their bombastic comedy and visual comedy respectively. Hugh Grant's Lofty and Keegan-Michael Key's Police Chief feel like the two underwritten acts with the latter being literally confined to one running gag. That being said, Wonka is definitely the Timothée Chalamet show - he seems to be confident of being a worthy successor to the likes of Gene Wilder and Johnny Depp who played the role of the eccentric Willy Wonka before him.

Watch Wonka for the levity (literally) and brevity, or watch it if you're a fan of Timothée. Ultimately the best thing we could say about Wonka is that the story feels like it could be written by Dahl himself, and as a childhood (and ongoing) Roald Dahl fan, I could not be more effusive in my praise.