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PLOT: A reclusive and insanely weird candy magnate gives five children -- winners of a chocolate lottery -- a tour of his mammoth factory, with horrible results for most of them.
It's funny how time and tide can change the flavour of a children's confection. Take Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, Tim Burton's reimagining of Roald Dahl's Willy Wonka tale, which now seems to be a movie about Michael Jackson.
It starts with Depp's high-voice and pasty face as Wonka -- just this side of Edward Scissorhands -- and his habit of putting hand to mouth as he titters. There's his awkwardness around people, an abusive dad, and the crucial plot point where he offers to bring the most-deserving child to live with him in his Chocolate Factory -- sans parents of course.
It adds an extra frisson of creepiness to the whole affair, the bad kind, as opposed to the good kind that otherwise springs freely from Burton's imagination like no other movie he's made since The Nightmare Before Christmas. His brightly-coloured pallette of manic nightmare is such a smooth fit with the misanthropy of the late Roald Dahl (whose story inspired the earlier Willy Wonka &The Chocolate Factory) that it's a shame they haven't been more frequent dance partners.
If you're someone who holds the story (and the Gene Wilder original film) fondly, the good news is Burton doesn't go too far afield plotwise in this tale of five "lucky" kids who get a nightmare tour of a chocolate dream factory. His main intrusion is to create some psychobabble-ish backstory, giving us Christopher Lee as Willy's traumatizing dentist dad (apparently people can't just be eccentric these days), but the deliciously bad ends of various spoiled kids are about the same.
Oh, and the Oompa Loompas. You're going to want to know about them. They're about 18 inches high in this version and all played by one balding middle-aged guy named Deep Roy who looks like an older version of Paul Bellini from Kids In The Hall. There's no more "Oompa Loompa doopity doo." Instead the Danny Elfman song that greets each child's downfall is something choreographed, taken from pop culture -- a Bollywood production number here, a music-video metal-band salute there. Purists may demur. We also take a trip to the steaming jungles of Loompaland, which was only alluded to in the Wilder movie.
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And there are the rotten kids -- all of whom have become cultural archetypes (the spoiled rich girl Veruca Salt even inspired an alt.rock band). Veruca (Julia Winter) is played here with a much toothier smile, but otherwise unchanged. It's Violet Beauregard (Annasophia Robb) who's altered -- presented as a modern overachieving child athlete (though she still chews gum).
Add the evil boys -- Mike Teavee (Jordon Fry) who is of course a vid-game addict now, and the porcine glutton Augustus Gloop (Philip Wiegratz) -- and poor ol' Charlie (Freddie Highmore) seems rather dull against the backdrop. His grandparents -- who share the one-room house with mom (Helena Bonham Carter) and dad (Noah Taylor) -- are a stitch though. I'll definitely take David Kelly as dotty Grandpa Joe over Jack Albertson.
In the future, we should be able to mix and match what we like from films and their remakes -- just like candy.
(This film is rated G)