Review: ‘Wonka’ Will Have You Wishing to be Narcanned at the Door

You may well begin to think that the MPAA rating system should have not just a minimum age limit but also a maximum — once...

The post Review: ‘Wonka’ Will Have You Wishing to be Narcanned at the Door appeared first on The Village Voice.

You may well begin to think that the MPAA rating system should have not just a minimum age limit but also a maximum — once you’re over, say, 10, you would not be admitted into some films, like the new origin-story affront Wonka, even if accompanied by an authentic preteen. Frankly, 10 might be pushing it. Maybe there should be a height restriction, too — 38 inches or under. I’d stump for an aptitude test as well: If you can spell “fatuous,” you’re turned out. Parents can wait in the pub across the street; the rest of us should consider ourselves lucky to have our attack of whimsy Narcanned right there at the door.

The fact that it’s a musical, as well as a tiresomely unnecessary origin story, and that it stars the still-punchable Timothée Chalamet as Roald Dahl’s young chocolatier, launching his career and battling the Slugworthian chocolate-corporate forces that rule the magical Potteresque city he finds himself in, is all you really need to know. Watching it is another matter; I’d rather have Windex sprayed in my eyes than endure another five minutes of the movie’s preening, video-game-hued palette, which looks 100% uncanny valley, despite the presence of real humans. Every inch of the film drips with a brightened CGI sheen, as if it were marinating in corn syrup.

Hugh Grant is the small blessing of human nutrient in the shovelful of treacle.

Like simple forest animals, small children can be stunned into trance-like attention in this way, probably contributing to a generation or two of frontopolar cortex underdevelopment. This is not to say that Wonka doesn’t pander to the adults as well, with inappropriate off-color jokes and quick patter, that effort being equally nauseating. The director, Paul King, arrives here having taken credit for shepherding, dauntingly, both Paddington and Paddington 2, with a box-office haul of half a billion bucks between them. (The latter, I happen to know, got one vote last year — out of the over 16,000 ballot votes worldwide for the British Film Institute’s decadal critics’ poll — as one of the best films ever made.) King’s films don’t need critics’ reviews, just diapers, as they unconsciously crap while toddling around, trying to be cute and instead leaving skid marks on your patience.

But, if we must, we could go geeky-granular, noticing how this prequel abandons Roald Dahl’s rather vicious critique of spoiled modern children (all hail Veruca Salt), in favor of a story lifted largely from the Rankin/Bass holiday special Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town (perhaps the source water for the origin-story impulse), with chocolate’s negative impact shifted away from dental destruction (Tim Burton’s flashback move, in the 2005 film) to mortifying obesity (Keegan-Michael Key’s policeman dons a John Candy–size fat suit). “Who needs to see their toes?” someone sings. Whatever, Dahl’s framing of chocolate’s narcotic impact on behavior and consciousness — one song characterizes the addictive chocolate buzz as a “hit” — is rather intensified, if only because everything is intensified, lest a viewer of any age wonder what the hell else they could be doing with their time.

I bitch not out of a bruised ardor for the “Wonka” universe, including the over-beloved 1971 film, and not out of loving Roald Dahl a fraction as much as Wes Anderson apparently does. In fact, the quick mention from Wonka on how he found one choco-ingredient “in Minsk” reminded me of Dahl’s famous anti-Semitism, which puts him in company with Agatha Christie and Alice Walker as Jew-hating authors whose legacies are enjoying fabulous, big-budgeted rebooting at the moment. How’s that for takeaway? Maybe it matters even less, once your stomach is turned — but then, lost in your reflux misery, Hugh Grant appears, like a Bromo-Seltzer and a back rub. It’s the film’s only flash of wit, casting Grant as the first and singular Oompa-Loompa, a foot high and green-haired but so insouciantly Grantian that you immediately conclude that he should be in every new movie, regardless of role, just as every bite of processed foodstuff should have a dose of vitamin fortification. He’s the small blessing of human nutrient in the shovelful of treacle. In fact, Grant’s entire recent resume, which includes Paddington 2, is a run of toxic nonsense from which he rises, time and again, like a single blooming wildflower.

But of course, Grant’s natural wit only throws the rest of Wonka’s smirking barrenness into sharp relief. Even if, like those forest animals, you found yourself dazzled by the ruckus, there’d still be no dodging the film’s desperate, overwrought desire to cash in — origin stories being a common franchise toggle. That’s no surprise, but if you were to be generous and characterize King’s movie on its own terms, you’d have to say it’s not very Wonkian at all. It’s all Slugworth. ❖

Michael Atkinson has been writing for the Village Voice since 1994. His latest book is the new edition of his BFI tract on David Lynch’s Blue Velvet.

The post Review: ‘Wonka’ Will Have You Wishing to be Narcanned at the Door appeared first on The Village Voice.