117 min | PG | December 15, 2023 | Warner Bros. Pictures
A young Willy Wonka shows up in a city where a chocolate cartel owns the police, the church, and the price of every bar. He has a head full of inventions and twelve coins to his name. The con is rigged, so he decides to out-magic it.
Willy Wonka arrives in a city built on chocolate with a hatful of dreams and twelve silver sovereigns. A cartel of established chocolatiers controls the trade and bribes the church and the police to keep newcomers out. Wonka lands in debt to a boarding house run by a swindler and gets pressed into indentured labor in her laundry. Paul King builds a prequel that is really about a young idealist discovering that the market is rigged before he has sold a single bar. The film tracks how Wonka turns ingenuity into leverage against the people who own the rules.
Timothée Chalamet plays Wonka with open-faced wonder and a salesman’s quick footwork. He sings without strain and dances with a loose physical comedy that keeps the optimism from turning saccharine. Calah Lane plays Noodle, the orphan trapped in the same laundry, with a guarded intelligence that grounds Wonka’s flights of fancy. Paterson Joseph plays Arthur Slugworth as a velvet-voiced monopolist who treats murder as a line item. Olivia Colman plays Mrs. Scrubbit with greedy relish, and Hugh Grant plays a pcompact green Oompa Loompa as a vain accountant nursing a centuries-old grudge.
King directs from a script he wrote with Simon Farnaby, and the two stage the musical numbers as practical set pieces rather than digital spectacle. The “Scrub Scrub” laundry sequence choreographs mops and washtubs into a working machine, and the camera moves through the steam in long takes that show the cast doing the labor on camera. The production design renders the chocolate cartel’s underground vault as a gilded bank, which makes the metaphor literal. Neil Hannon’s original songs carry the plot forward instead of pausing it. The color palette runs warm and storybook bright, pitched closer to a 1971 musical than to anything contemporary.
This is a comedy about a creator who refuses to let the gatekeepers price him out. King smooths away the cruelty that defines the source material and replaces it with a gentler story about generosity beating monopoly. The result trades menace for warmth and mostly earns the exchange. Wonka works because it commits fully to its own sincerity and never winks at the audience.