What has kept the character of Willy Wonka alive are memes.  This is incredible when you consider his first appearance was in the 1964 Roald Dahl novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.  Nobody remembers this because the person most people associate with the eccentric candy maker is Gene Wilder playing him in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971).  There is also Johnny Depp’s reprisal of this fictional person in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005), but we will not be discussing that one.  Besides, it is Wilder’s face on all the memes.  You know the ones, which usually have the phrase “Tell me more. . . .” in them.  Because these exist, Hollywood thought to themselves, you know what, let us make a song and dance origin story about the man and the beginning of his chocolate empire.  On my way home from the theater, I called and asked my dad the question that plagued me while watching Wonka: do you remember the 1971 film as a musical?  Do not get me wrong, there are songs in it, but that is not its main mode of storytelling.  Yet, those responsible for Wonka decided to play up this aspect.  One might argue that all the cinematic iterations of Dahl’s most famous work are meant to stand on their own.  This does not match with the recent productions.  Please do not take what is to follow as a type of Boomer stance, complaining about how things were better back in my day.  I just found this recent iteration boring, though its style did not help.

If you remember the 1971 version, then you will recall that Willy Wonka (Timothée Chalamet), henceforth just Wonka, is a worldly man.  You get a sense of where he got some of the stories he will one day tell as he is let off a ship after a long voyage abroad.  With twelve sovereigns, which is apparently not the only form of currency in this mad world, he walks through the streets of Wherever Town (my name for it as it is never labeled) to visit the Galeries Gourmet where all the best chocolatiers have shops.  It is here that he hopes to one day open his own candy store, fulfilling a promise he made to his late mother (Sally Hawkins) as a boy.  Upon arrival, he dazzles the shoppers, but earns the ire of his future competitors, namely Arthur Slugworth (Paterson Joseph).  He leads a literal chocolate cartel, but we will get to that in a moment.  It is also apparent that Wonka is a generous sort, and he gives away all his money rather quickly, including to the police who enforce the absurd daydreaming surcharge.  Now penniless, he is about to spend the night outside in the cold when he is approached by a large man named Bleacher (Tom Davis).  Bleacher lures Wonka to Mrs. Scrubitt (Olivia Colman) with the promise of cheap accommodations.  Before Wonka can get a room, he must sign a lengthy contract, and he is warned against doing so by Noodle (Calah Lane).  She is a girl who works in the laundry room, you know, because all boarding houses also wash the clothes of the entire neighborhood.  Wonka signs it anyway because he cannot read (which, huh?) and promises to pay the one sovereign duty the next day when he sells his amazing candies.  This proves successful until Slugworth leans on the Chief of Police (Keegan-Michael Key) to confiscate his earnings.  Wonka thus returns to Mrs. Scubitt without the promised proceeds, and gets a shock when he is shown a 10,000 sovereign bill for his stay.  Because he cannot pay it, he is forced to labor with a motley group of people in the washer room below.  Despite his increasingly grim prospects, he continues to pursue his desire to sell his chocolate.  What he needs is an escape, and he enlists Noodle’s help to accomplish this goal.  He also devises a contraption for making sure the washing gets down while he is away, and also gives his fellow inmates a break.  As for the watchful gaze of Bleacher and Mrs. Scrubitt, Wonka contrives of a way of getting them to fall in love with each other to distract while he makes his getaway.  He does so because he believes in his product, though it appears that he inadvertently stole his cocoa beans from the Oompa-Loompas.  This is the accusation given by Lofty (Hugh Grant), who is on a mission to take back the chocolate.  Still, the larger problem (pun intended) is the Chocolate Cartel.  They know that Wonka is back to selling his goods, though they cannot catch him because Noodle and the others help him slip into the sewers whenever the fuzz nears.  With the money he earns, Wonka is able to finally open his store.  Unfortunately, Slugworth gets wind of this and manages to get Bleacher and Mrs. Scrubitt to sabotage some of the sweets.  The opening is proving profitable until several customers eat candies that cause them to grow long strands of colorful hair.  In the resulting riot, the interior is destroyed and Wonka wants to quit despite the encouragement of his co-conspirators.  In the ruins, Slugworth approaches Wonka with a deal: Slugworth will pay everyone’s debt if Wonka agrees to leave town and stop making chocolate.  Wonka accepts these terms and is promptly put onto a boat.  He is joined by Lofty, who grudgingly offers some advice before the ship is blown up by sabotage.  They manage to jump off before the detonation.  Wonka then goes to Noodle, who Slugworth instead pays to have kept in bondage by Bleacher and Mrs. Scrubitt.  Wonka frees Noodle and, with their fellow former inmates, break into the Cartel’s vault . . . underneath St. Benedict’s Cathedreal (more on this later, obviously).  They do so to get the evidence of Slugworth and the Cartel’s shady dealings.  With some help from Lofty, they are able to accomplish this fact, which also reveals that Noodle is the heir to the Slugworth fortune.  Wonka then returns Noodle to her mother, Dorothy Smith (Tracy Ifeachor), before we end with him at the site of his famous factory envisioning how it will look.

There were a lot of things I did not understand about Wonka, though, admittedly, much of this has to do with its 1971 predecessor.  As I mentioned in the introduction, an argument against my complaints could be made that the movies are not meant to be related to one another.  I can see that for the Depp version, but Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factoryand Wonka appear to be more related to one another.  Chalamet and Wilder look vaguely similar; the Oompa-Loompas are the same, if shorter, in this recent installment; and there are clear copies of music from 1971 to the present-day.  While musical themes are borrowed, the only song that is taken mostly in its entirety is “Pure Imagination.”  Wonka adds a few new verses, but it is the same ditty.  This decision is puzzling.  “Pure Imagination” is one of two songs Willy Wonka sings in the 1971 film, though that is stretching the word “singing.”  So, why make this new one a musical?  Speaking of things borrowed, or in this case not borrowed, I also do not get the decision to make Wonka illiterate, though he seems to have picked up reading in a matter of a week or so.  I guess this was more of his ridiculous magic?  Further, I do not believe they understood the spirit of the original production.  I have not read any of Dahl’s novels on which this is all based, so I suppose Wonka could be more faithful to the source material.  However, since it appears that Wonka relies a great deal on Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, it should be pointed out that at no point in the 1971 installment is chocolate a form of currency, at least not literally.  Perhaps they look at the lifetime supply of chocolate won by Charlie Bucket (Peter Ostrum) as a monetary prize?  Anyway, I found this confusing.  Finally, whenever the film backs itself into a plot corner, it uses magic to get out of it.  This is lazy writing.

Saying that aspects of Wonka did not make sense is silly given how it is intentionally bizarre.  I was more angered by watching it as a Catholic.  Again, I am unfamiliar with Dahl’s work, so if this is in the original material . . . then I am still piqued.  If it is not, which I suspect is more the case, then I am not sure how the filmmakers arrived at the decision of making a Catholic Church be the secret lair for a criminal enterprise based on chocolate.  The Church has enough problems reaching the youth for it to be made out to be complicit with evil in a movie that is supposedly aimed at children.  I get it.  Catholicism is a visual Faith.  As I have mentioned in other reviews where a movie directly deals with the Church, one can show a priest or a nun and immediately signal that you are dealing with a Christian instead of having to explain the same thing about a plain clothed protestant.  At the same time, there are plenty of other parts of culture that a film could show and accomplish the same end.  The worst is when they use the Confessional as a means to get down to the Cartel’s vault.  I am also not sure what they were trying to accomplish with the insertion of a number of Friars.  The hasty repentance by Father Julius (Rowan Atkinson) as he is being attacked by a giraffe (no joke) is not only insincere, but adds insult to injury.  I am not trying to say that Catholicism is humorless.  I have had many hilarious conversations with female and male religious.  At the same time, there are some things that are sacred, and the Confessional is one of them.  Sure, this is meant to be a comedy, but there are other avenues to take than to violate some of the things our Faith holds dear.

Getting mad over the representations of Catholicism in Wonka is about the only time my pulse quickened while watching Wonka.  I sat through all the musical interludes with my head in my hand, sighing, and waiting for it to end.  There is a moment I did not specify when Noodle and Wonka are trapped in a vat of chocolate and are about to drown.  This might make you think it is exciting, but when you remember the fact that you know he survives based on the 1971 movie, then is there any real danger?  Thus, why watch this?