"Wonka" Review: The Most Pointless Movie Ever Made

It's not awful, but just because you can does NOT mean you should.

December 19, 2023

At the turn of the 20th century (because we’re now deep enough into the millennium that we have to qualify that… sigh), the first rotary dial telephone was introduced. It was the latest development in telecommunications, and the nation was awestruck; it went a little something like this:

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“Oh, Harold, didn’t you hear? Now you can dial the number yourself instead of having someone do it for you!”

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“But, Dorothy, this is America. We’re supposed to rely on other people for everything while being deeply ungrateful for having our entire livelihood provided for us.”

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“Oh. Well, it’s new. Let’s buy it!”

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Six decades later, at the 1962 World’s Fair in Seattle, the Bell Telephone company debuted their new “Touch-Tone” technology, allowing one to press a button to “dial” a number.

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Why was this development necessary?

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Well, to put it simply, because we were tired of that shit, and no greater need exists in American consumer culture than something new to assuage our boredom, and necessity is the mother of invention…

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unless you’re Wonka, in which case the mother of invention iiiiiiiiiiiisssssss………

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In most respects, Wonka, the third big-screen adaptation of Roald Dahl’s beloved children’s book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, is a high-brow aim at a low bar, mostly because it sets the bar for itself and is stubborn in insisting it leaps over it. You have two options as you consume its ceaseless sentimentality and unrelenting sweetness: take it at face value or lament all the ways it could’ve been better.

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In the former, it's a plain Jane kids' movie trying to wrap families in a contrived but comforting Christmas embrace. In that respect, it’s a near-hit with excellence in so many ways it feels like a bonafide letdown.

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Why? Because even in the most minute ways, it fails to distinguish itself. You know how every movie musical’s songs sound the same, so you need the tracklist to distinguish them from one another? Or how it always chooses that one song to ram down your throat (in this case, “A World of Your Own”) to try to create a phenomenon and score an Oscar, but it’s always the most mediocre song on the album? Or how there’s always, always that one song that sucks, and you can’t figure out why they even put it in the movie (looking at you, Frozen’s Ice Workers song)?

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Yeah, there’s a lot of that.

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If you want the color and vibrance of the most beloved kid’s classics, look elsewhere. Wonka’s appearance in the unnamed city signals a new dawn, where chocolate conglomerates get shoved aside for a shameless optimist whose only ambition is dropping a truffle of whimsical sweetness into your day. In that sense, the bland aesthetic makes sense; if the people were content, had the possibilities been made clear to them before Wonka ever leapt off the boat he came in on, there’d be no movie. Still, you’re essentially spending two hours looking at a lifeless painting put to screen with all the muted colors you know and love.

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When Willy must be that special something, it’s hit-and-miss. Chalamet has a light behind his eyes and natural charisma that makes you root for him in any role, whether a teenager struggling to overcome addiction or a candy maker fighting the power. Sadly, that leaves him essentially running on fumes: this role takes a natural child-at-heart mentality that Chalemet doesn’t possess. Wonka's heartier moments fall flat under his inability to break through, and he gets little help from his partner-in-crime, Noodle. Calah Lane (in her first major film role) isn’t up to the task, and her inability to keep up with Chalamet, who already has his own limitations, makes us wish the film had approached the narrative differently.

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Sure, it’s easy to throw in the cute kid and bank on everyone investing in a potential happy ending, but Wonka would’ve benefitted from a more Ocean’s 11 approach. The team Willy assembles at the boarding house run by the corrupt Mrs. Scrubbit each get a small role in the finale, but without enough screen time (or proper use of limited screen time), we don’t know what purpose they serve.

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In fact, it’s not a stretch to claim even the filmmakers struggled with finding purpose for all their characters. Noodle gets the lion's share of the work after Willy, but her only role is to teach him how to read. It feels like the writers got to the end, realized Noodle served zero purpose, and contrived Willy’s illiteracy to create a full circle moment at film’s end.

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If looked at any more critically, the film falters even more. Mrs. Scrubbit and her bulky partner-in-crime run the Scrubbit boarding house, where Wonka gets trapped into a nearly 30-year “contract” to pay off his exorbitant lodging expenses, except… what is the plan here exactly?

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Paying their “workers” only one sovereign daily ensures decades of work at practically no cost. Yet, we don’t see them dressed in extravagant garments or living in the lap of luxury. The film wants to undermine the foundational tenets of capitalism by positioning Wonka as the irrepressible idealist against conglomerates who shove out the little guy and corrupt business owners who exploit their consumers while making off with all the money, but Mrs. Scrubbit isn't wealthy by any means.

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So, trick the needy into (basically) indentured servitude, but to what end? What is the goal?

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But, despite all these flaws, if you take Wonka at face value: a garden-variety kids movie looking to cash in on a beloved IP at the holidays, it’s… fine. It’s not spectacular, not atrocious, not great, not bad, just a movie that exists in the most nondescript and inoffensive way imaginable.

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Is this disappointing, considering countless children’s movies have shown how well one can weave adult humor into flicks for the youngins? Yes. Is it slightly maddening considering how well the original film took some bizarre turns on the road to its iconic status while retaining its childlike charm? Yes.

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Alas, sometimes we must acknowledge something’s unfulfilled potential, the various ways it fails in the thinly veiled fashion it attempts what few things it seeks to relay, shrug our shoulders, look at that $15 ticket, and say,

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“Oh, well. It’s new. Let’s buy it.”