The Start of the Burton Slide

Rating: 6/10 (25 February 2020)

I used to be a huge fan of Tim Burton. His eccentricities and oddball imagination made him a true visionary artist and his sense of humour was sufficiently askew to make his work not only funny but pleasingly strange and refreshingly unlike that of any other Hollywood director.
However, increasingly these days, his work is (I want to tear my tongue out for saying this) stale and samey, and the trademark Burton humour seems to have been replaced in large part by a need to show just how eccentric and weird he can be.
This trend, I think, began here, with Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
Rather than being warm, charming and funny with just the right amount of weird darkness, which used to be the way of things when it came to Burton projects, this movie, as far as I can see, has dispensed with a lot of its predecessors' warmth and charm, instead opting to put the onus on the strange.
Depp's performance here, too extracts the intimidating aspects of the character of Willy Wonka together with any interesting traits of the character that have made him such an appealing and intriguing figure, and just kept the unsettling weirdness.
The positives here are that, in the main, the acting is pretty good; the look of the thing, as always with Burton, is lovely; and this version of Roald Dahl's novel is a lot closer to the source material than the 1971 Gene Wilder version.
In the end, as films in general go, this is probably about average, but, as Burton films go, it's below par, or rather, it was when it was released. Now I'd say it's there or thereabouts in terms of what to expect from Tim Burton, and that makes me sad.