Well done! Entertaining, and stays true to the book!

Rating: 8/10 (2 August 2005)

I was kinda on the fence about this movie. I respect Johnny Depp and Tim Burton quite a bit, and was a HUGE Roald Dahl fan as a child (James and the Giant Peach and Fantastic Mr. Fox were my personal favs), but I wasn't a big fan of the Gene Wilder movie. Oh I liked it, but it was too...whimsical. I never felt Willy Wonka was a happy, jolly man who sings songs. I thought he was a bit creepy, and more than a little nuts.
So, imagine my surprise when someone crawls into my head and makes the Charlie movie I always wanted.
There are so many times I laughed in this movie, I can't count them. And for a children's movie, this one was blessedly free of fart jokes, and toilet humor - thank god, or I would have revoked my Johnny Depp Fan Club membership for making that movie.
This isn't a movie everyone is going to enjoy - there are some disturbing parts (not sick-disturbing, or overly scary-disturbing, but he IS a creepy man), and its not the way a lot of people apparently imagined Wonka to be. But the children are all PERFECTLY cast, and the best scenes from the book are all here, in very grim and very excellent detail.
The movie adds a few scenes, but these are well done and in keeping with the story they were trying to tell. Its not a "purist's" favorite thing, but they work.
Well worth seeing in the theater. This was the first Hollywood movie I saw in Imax, and I don't regret that one bit - this movie was GREAT on Imax, and gave the whole thing a "larger than life" feel that wound perfectly with the theme of the movie.
See it. Even if you don't like it, you should still feel it was worth your time. Its a lot of fun!