A Delicious Slab of Cinematic Chocolate, Alas, Without a Golden Ticket

Willy Wonka, the chocolate magnate, is on the hunt for a worthy successor to join him in inventing extraordinary sweets.

Tim Burton’s Attempt at Redemption

It seems Tim Burton, the wizard-in-training who has spawned a host of atypical creatures—flowers instead of ears, for example—and the founder of a gallery of strange types, the patron of a hospital for enchanted freaks—all these Frankenweenies, Beetlejuices, Jack Skellingtons, and Edward Scissorhands—has decided to make amends and create a human goat, even if from the not-so-kind book by Roald Dahl.

Even so, Willy Wonka, the dentist’s son, finds himself in futuristic braces from childhood. It’s not quite Edward Scissorhands, but you immediately believe he has at least 33 teeth. Later, the chocolate magnate looks no worse than Michael Jackson: a white rabbit in a top hat and gloves, rushing through a suite of sweet wonders. The genius of nougat and the chief of caramel doesn’t really know where to turn until some right-minded child comes along and shows the wayward Wonka the path to true values. The child reminds him of the taste of his first candy and that it’s unnatural for a person, even with such creative abilities, to be alone.

The Spectacle and the Substance

Even without a grandfather, be he a dentist or a dancing coffee bean. As for the degenerate children, the remaining bad guys belong in the trash, since the spoiled brats, in their mature pathology, give the adult scoundrels a hundred points, and the film’s author—an excuse to arrange a sideshow in the spirit of Dr. Caligari. Burton’s lavishly staged film, for all its ordinary filling, bubbles on the surface with fancy taffy bubbles, but sometimes it sags. Tim Burton is still occupied with the mechanics of attractions, and his cogs and gears, perhaps, do not even need such an unburdensome plot design.