more faithful, but disturbing and dark

Rating: 6/10 (8 April 2008)

I assign six points because of the quality of the production and the acting: assuming that Johnny Depp set out to achieve what I detail below, then I suppose his performance was phenomenal.
But what he achieved was to portray Willy Wonka as a sadistic gay psychotic.
When Gene Wilder portrayed Wonka in the legendary 1971 production, Wonka came off as eccentric, but we always sensed that he enjoyed children (regardless of his sometimes questionable disposals thereof) and, of course, had a noble heart. In contrast, Depp's Wonka continually disses the children verbally; does everything in his power to convince him that he's disturbed, possibly even a child molester; and engages in strange, STRANGE behaviors.
Why, for example, was it necessary for Wonka to begin the tour with a self-immolating puppet show where puppets burned and melted and showed horribly disfigured faces with eyes melting and popping out? Was it solely to support the extremely weak joke--hours later (if, indeed, the viewer made the connection and "got" the joke)--that the "Puppet Hospital and Burn Center" was "relatively new" to the factory? Also, what was the point of the room where green-suited men sheared pink sheep, to which Wonka said, "I'd rather not talk about that"? When Wonka revealed that his intention was to give the factory to "the least rotten" of the five children, we learned all we needed to know.
When I saw Wonka's adventures begin with Prince Pondicherry and his ill-fated chocolate taj, I was excited by the evident faithfulness to the book, but that excitement was eventually dispelled by the last fifteen minutes of the movie--which had zero to do with the book--embarked on a foolish odyssey whereby Wonka reunited with his estranged dentist father (uncommittedly played by the great Christopher Lee). Wonka was a creep, a weirdo, a sicko, and, overall, just a most unpleasant character, motivating to ask, "Why on earth would anyone be interested in chasing THIS clod around to obtain his 'secrets'?" Keep this movie far away from your kids, and watch it only if you're interested in how a shambles can be made of a classic story by offering bizarrely unpleasant interpretations of fondly remembered characters and introducing weak, extraneous material. Further, inexplicable substitutions of characters were made, to wit, Mr. Salt was replaced with Mrs. Salt (very, very weak, as Mr. Salt contributed a strong comic touch to the 1971 production), while Mrs. Teevee was replaced by Mr. Teevee (leaving us with a weakly characterized Milquetoast in place of a truly funny overstressed mom {whom I always thought was Alice Ghostley but, in fact, was not}).
Yecch!