Gross; obvious original film comparisons abound

Rating: 5/10 (15 August 2006)

I'm not sure that I've ever finished a film feeling so violated as I did watching the latest cinematic offering of the increasingly boorish and tedious Tim Burton.
From start to finish, the film seemed utterly bent on inducing vomit in the viewer, from Depp's creepy pallor and doll-like features (there was something fundamentally wrong with the scene where he admits with a school-boy demeanour and submissiveness to his father that he had not flossed in all the years they had been apart), to the sets, to the hammy dialogue right to the repugnant children. OK, we can accept that the "innocence of childhood" is fast becoming a thing of the past if we like, though I was a precocious child of the 80s, I liked to play violent video games, but I doubt my being would have inspired such disgust as Burton intended to inspire with the stock, precocious American child. I'm not sure I've ever seen a child simply being a child be so thoroughly demonised on screen. It's as if Burton would not be satisfied until the audience was collectively screaming for this kid to be dismembered. There was absolutely no mirth in it, no sense of appropriate playfulness, to go with this hyper-depressing message. The film was utterly self-defeating.
Aside from this, the film lacked all the wit of the first, and the set pieces would, ironically, only have pleased the most ADD-addled child.
Everything is presented in the most simple, literal fashion, from excess to poverty to familial disjointedness; we are smacked over the head with all of these aspects of the story, and I for one was left only cold.
I'm usually fond of Depp, but his version of Wonka is another ADD benefit show, though it was probably mostly Burton's "vision" of him, as some ultra-closeted Michael Jackson of the surreal world. Wilder's Wonka was more sympathetic, and likable despite his faults, and we did not need the slapdash plot-thickening and really quite ridiculous back story for that, just a sense of a despairing, reluctant adult with lost ambitions, which Wilder brought to the screen with perfect grace.
Another point is the original film was largely a projection of the current world, with it taking on more old fashioned characteristics in some areas, and some hyper-futuristic aspects in others. It was a mix, but the parts themselves were at least faintly recognisable in some way, and this was not the case with Burton's. The world is sloppy, fairy-tale kitsch, with a fully sign-posted story journey.
I, for one, hated it, and have no idea where Burton thought he could inject anything new into the old story. All he did was butcher the more endearing aspects of the original film, whilst packing it with his ego and dull sense of righteousness.