"Wonka" Review: Paul King Gets The Job Done, But It Feels Like He'd Rather Be Making Another Paddington Movie Instead
It’s both a blessing and a curse that Paul King is the one to helm the origin story of the worlds quirkiest and most beloved chocolatier. On one hand, he shows a tremendous amount of effort in every shot, but on the other hand, you can’t help but get the feeling that his talents would better suit another Paddington film.
Paul King puts a lot of care into the story, care that I don’t think would have been there if any other director had taken on the project. Much like his previous Paddington films, he places a special importance on visual gags. The placement of characters in a setting, their placement in a shot and objects surrounding them all play into the joke. He’s also extremely dedicated to making the ensemble stand out as much as possible. Every character Wonka meets along the way, whether it be for a couple of seconds or a few minutes, have their own little story and are portrayed and performed in their own fanciful way.
In line with Paul King fashion, he weaves in an astute satire that’s both subtle and sincere enough to not be on the nose. While Paddington struggled against xenophobia, Wonka must face off against the corporate forces of capitalism. And yet, it’s very pot-calling-the-kettle-black for Warner Brothers to be the ones making a film about people who are fighting against the attitude that “the greedy beat the needy”. Nonetheless, it’s still interesting to see how Paul King sifts it through a filter of whimsy and weaves it seamlessly into his story. Just because he’s making a family movie, doesn’t mean he throws away the opportunity to say something important.
On the other hand, perhaps Paul King is still too interested in telling Paddington’s story to move on to telling Willy Wonka’s. You could have replaced Wonka with the ever-so-sweet bear and you’d practically have a Paddington movie. There’s something all too familiar about a naive and optimistic newcomer experiencing the harsh cynicism of the real world. It’s for this reason that there’s nothing about Wonka that’s unique to its namesake. Yes, it explores how Wonka started his chocolate empire, but it doesn’t dive into the mythos of Willy Wonka as I had hoped it would. We never get to see this wondrous world of chocolate making in all its glory. We never get to fully learn who this chocolatier is. Wonka is, for all intents and purposes, uninterested in its protagonist.
It doesn’t help that all the musical numbers in Wonka are for the most part pretty pedestrian. None of the choreography brings any excitement to the screen, none of the music is lively enough, and all of the singing feels so unemotional and flat. At the very least, I’ll say that the musical numbers were built into the film well. They felt like they belonged in all the right places. But they didn’t have me wanting to sing in my seat, a symptom I always want to feel from a musical. Apart from the songs that were taken from the 1971 film, I found myself walking away from Wonka, having remembered very few songs.
Timothee Chalamet does well enough that his performance doesn’t make you cringe. He does what he does best at the film’s climax, when he gets to show off his emotional acting. Apart from a couple of questionable lines, he doesn’t overact, as I feared he would. But I wouldn’t say I was necessarily impressed with his performance. This may be because the script requires him to do so little with his performance, or because he himself was playing it too safe, but his portrayal never brought the film up a notch, as Gene Wilder’s did.
I’d be a fool to say that Wonka doesn’t get the job done. It succeeds as a fun family movie, with an ending that makes you go “aw…” and leaves you wanting to forget all the other dull parts. But unlike Paddington, that’s all it is. It’s not something that brought me tremendous joy through every second, or something I would want to revisit immediately. So, as much as Paul King is able to bring a level of care to the filmmaking of Wonka, he still seems too hung up on the marmalade loving bear, to place any care on this film’s protagonist, leaving you less excited about watching a story about Willy Wonka and more excited to see another Paddington film.
