Film Reviews

Charlie And The Chocolate Factory

• Rating:
• Director: Tim Burton.
• Starring: Johnny Depp, Freddie Highmore, David Kelly.
• Details: US / 115 mins (PG).

Perennial Christmas fave Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory gets the Tim Burton-Johnny Depp treatment, which transforms a loveably ramshackle and genuinely subversive tale into a gleaming, sterile exercise in contrived wackiness. Freddie Highmore (Finding Neverland) is appropriately wide-eyed as young Charlie Bucket, but he never really seems to connect with the story, and offers little by way of the slap-dash energy that characterised Peter Ostrum's role in the original. David Kelly makes for a fine Grandpa Joe, but Depp's performance is all physical tics and mannered leers, a beautifully polished outing which lacks the warmth that lurked beneath the perversity of Gene Wilder's turn. Burton offers some excellent moments, not least of which is the scene in the TV room, where the teleporting chocolate bar sequence is incorporated into the apes segment from 2001: A Space Odyssey, but there is too much on show that suffers by comparison with the original. The Oompa-Loompas are damp squibs, their funky, '60s-influenced songs thudding along (other than the Oompa-Loompa's offerings, the rest of the songs have been disposed of, including, unforgivably, The Candyman, Pure Imagination and Wonka's bonkers soliloquy on the Wondrous Boat Ride). It's all a terrific shame, particularly as Burton had at his disposal a budget that could have visually enhanced Roald Dahl's vision, but while the interior of the chocolate factory is rendered in eye-jolting day-glo colours, that only emphasises the extent to which this remake literally realises, to its detriment, the dream-like quality of the original. My suggestion? Rent Willy Wonka. Altogether now: "Come with me, And you'll be, In a world of pure imagination..."

Review by Declan Burke