An absolute abomination

Rating: 1/10 (5 November 2005)

This is not the only awful film to be made from a children's book in the last few years: Lemony Snicket and Cat in the Hat spring to mind, and certainly, the Harry Potter movies are never much better than mediocre.
But Charlie and the Chocolate Factory suffers from the fact that it must be compared to the Gene Wilder version, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, which is not only superior to it in every way, but is truly a classic film.
One might well ask why anyone would dare to remake a film that was written by Roald Dahl himself. A film that had beautiful, classic songs, biting humor, and a hilarious cast.
The answer, of course, is money.
This film was made for one reason -- to wring more money out of a Warner Brothers property. Why else remake a nearly perfect film? It's an insult to moviegoers and an affront to the many children who may never bother to watch the original now that they've seen this trash.
The thing is, the Gene Wilder version is very, very funny. Its comedy still seems edgy today. And somehow, they've managed to turn it into a movie with almost no laughs. The timing is sometimes, it seems, deliberately thrown off.
Johnny Depp's performance is, I think, his worst ever. It's just stupendously bad. Then again, he has basically nothing to work with, caught between plain, unfunny new dialogue, and struggling to go in the opposite direction from Gene Wilder's brilliance. I don't envy the task. But don't worry, Johnny got lots and lots of money for his troubles.
The new Charlie, Freddie Highmore, was decent enough in the tearjerker Finding Neverland. But here, he's just all wrong. His one acting choice seems to be "Smile Every Time You Say Something," which I last saw used by Denise Richards in Starship Troopers.
On one hand, I wondered as I was watching it whether the movie would fare better with someone who'd never seen the original. But on the other, this film is so disjointed and strange, I'm not sure how anyone could follow it if they hadn't seen the first film.
The Oompa Loompa "songs," if you can call them that, consist of CG clones singing the same rhyming lines over and over again. There is no narrative or melodic progression to the songs -- they are as two dimensional as cardboard cutouts.
Add to this bland, unimaginative mix a few ghastly changes from the earlier movie: Charlie has a father now, his family magically gets "unpoor" at the end by the dint of their own optimism, and Willy Wonka learns -- get ready for this one -- that families are not a bad thing.
It's beyond awful. Watch the original again instead, I beg of you.