When crazy-pants Tim Burton decided to redo Planet of the Apes a few years back, that was fine by me. It was a lousy movie anyway, and I didn't figure he could make it any worse. He did, of course, but that wasn't enough to shake my faith in the man who's helmed some of the most stunning films of the last few decades.
But when I heard that Burton was taking on the task of remaking the 1971 classic Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, my vote for the best children's film ever, I was confused. Apes was one thing. But what possible point is there to re-make a strange, beautiful and perfect movie?
I figured Burton's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory could turn out one of two ways: either a smashing visual reinterpretation that could sit comfortably alongside its predecessor, or a dismal failure devoid of any of the wit and charm of the flawless movie it sought to do over. As it turns out, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is neither: it is, rather, strikingly similar to the original in both story and tone, with several glaring flaws and very few (if any) improvements. Entertaining? Absolutely. But completely unnecessary.
One would think Tim Burton, one of the more willingly experimental directors in Hollywood, would've taken a sharp left turn with his take on Charlie, but the original film is echoed nearly everywhere here; some of it done just as well as before, but none of it any better. Virtually every scene from the first flick is replicated, occasionally to the letter. All of the children are the same, with two exceptions; Charlie has darker hair and no personality, and gum-smacking Violet Beauregarde is played just as before but with a welcome bit of edge.
And then there's the man-boy himself, Willy Wonka. We seem to have convinced ourselves that Johnny Depp can do anything, and far more often than not, we're right. But as Willy Wonka, Depp makes a rare misfire; he looks the part, but for all his goofing off, he doesn't take the character far out enough, and ends up less like the infamous chocolatier and more like Johnny Depp in a red suit with a weird voice. Gene Wilder's heartfelt performance as Wonka was the centerpiece of the first film, but here, Depp simply mugs for the camera, plugging the holes between shots of pretty-looking set pieces.
Burton's take on the factory is unsurprisingly beautiful, but the quicker modern cuts of the cinematography actually make it more difficult to take it all in. Charlie looks like a Tim Burton film, for sure; but this is the same Tim Burton who made the poetic Edward Scissorhands and the oddball Pee-wee's Big Adventure, films that were not only visually stunning, but also one-of-a-kind. Charlie may be great to look at, but you'd have a hard time arguing that it's unique, since there was already a movie pretty much exactly like this 30 years ago.
And then there's the stuff Burton screws up, the things from the first movie he forgot and the dumb things he adds. There's no scene here where Charlie and Grandpa Joe sip the Fizzy Lifting Drink and shoot up in the sky, which, alone, should tell you that there's truly something missing here. The fantastic songs from the first film are also nowhere to be found, no singalong "Candyman" or "Pure Imagination" or "I've Got a Golden Ticket." And there's this whole subplot about Willy Wonka's father as a candy-hating taskmaster which is, frankly, dumb. The best addition to the new Charlie is the Oompa Loompas, each one played to deadpan perfection by the same actor, Burton favorite Deep Roy. Roy isn't an improvement over the original Loompas, but by simply not having green hair and an orange face, he's at least a bit different than his on-screen predecessors.
And that's the thing about this new, hardly-improved Charlie; the movie sidesteps disaster simply by riding on the back of the landmark original it so closely emulates. It's not terrible; in fact, it's rather enjoyable. But since there's another, better Willy Wonka movie in the world, Burton's film remains simply charming, well-executed, and pointless.
