The best excuse for an origin story is not to delve further into a character we know and love, but into a world we know and love. Roald Dahl gave us such a world with his 1964 book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and though it isn’t officially London, it reminds us of other magical Londons we’ve known in literature and film. Among them are the London of Harry Potter, the London of 101 Dalmatians, the London of Mary Poppins, and yes, the London of Paddington the bear. This last makes Paul King, director of Paddington and its particularly beloved sequel, an ideal choice to give us a long look into the beginnings of one Mr. Willy Wonka.

Like Poppins and the original film based on Dahl’s book, 1971’s Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, King’s Wonka is a musical, adding complication to an already high degree of difficulty to get everything just right. Only a few of the most memorable songs from that movie reappear, while the rest are original works provided by Neil Hannon, with lyrics by King and screenwriter Simon Farnaby. Some of these have the potential to be earworms.

King, Hannon, Barnaby and star Timothee Chalamet may not get everything just right after all, but they easily clear the low bar set by recent origin stories. Most origin stories exist because the characters have reached a definitive endpoint beyond which there is no telling new tales, and have a cynical underpinning of trying to continue to make bank on an old idea. The better ones at least have a twinkle of magic in the crafting. Wonka is one of those.

Willy Wonka (Chalamet) is returning to port after seven years on the high seas, during which he has collected extraordinary recipes for chocolate from far-flung corners of the world. Now it’s time to make his fortune in the chocolate business. Having seen the world hasn’t bestowed on him a huge amount of practical wisdom, and he embarks on this task with a comically small number of silver sovereigns in his pocket, most of which are expended on his very first day, being generous to the boy who shines his shoes on three different occasions whether he wants it or not. Similar flim flam schemes take advantage of his good nature, before the ultimate one gets him.

When he’s looking for a place to stay that first night, he happens across Bleacher (Tom Davis), a shifty gentleman whose apparent menace would be clocked by anyone with a modicum of good sense. Bleacher brings him back to an inn/laundromat run by Mrs. Scrubbitt (Olivia Colman), who offers him a night’s stay with no payment due up front – but gets him to sign a lengthy contract that Willy can’t read because he’s illiterate, which she assures him is just boilerplate. Before he knows it he’s indebted to these two charlatans for $10,000 for things like the fee for using the stairs – both directions. He’s thrown into the dungeon to work off his debt with a half dozen others, including an orphan called Noodle (Calah Lane) and an accountant called Abacus Crunch (Jim Carter). (Great names, hey?)

Willy did wow the crowds on that first day with his “hoverchocs,” chocolates with tiny insects inside whose beating wings cause you to elevate. So he and Noodle devise a plan to escape during the afternoon hours with Scrubbitt and Bleacher distracted, to sell enough chocolate to pay off all their debts. This attracts the attention of another set of villains, the three leading chocolate manufacturers, also known as the Chocolate Cartel: Mr. Slugworth (Paterson Joseph), Mr. Prodnose (Matt Lucas) and Mr. Fickelgruber (Mathew Baynton). They’ll scheme to end Willy’s entrepreneurial ambitions by whatever means necessary.

It’s evident how much fun everyone had bringing this world back to life for the first time since the considerably less fun middle instalment of what is now effectively a trilogy. The gloom Tim Burton draped on the proceedings with Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is wiped away by the can-do spirit of Chalamet’s Wonka and the sweetness of King. (He’s well aware of this tendency in himself, as the movie announces itself in the opening credits as a “Paul King confection.”) Chalamet is a wild card, but the hint of insanity that Gene Wilder established and Johnny Depp drove over the top into total inaccessibility is basically not here. This is an impish Wonka who wouldn’t for a moment take delight in another’s suffering, and he’s suited to the sensibilities of the film around him.

There may be no actor having more fun, but showing it less through his dry delivery, than Hugh Grant as this film’s single Oompa Loompa. Grant was undoubtedly cast after having worked with King on Paddington 2, but the construction of his face makes him a dead ringer for the 1971 Oompa Loompas we originally loved. Due to the increased flexibility of today’s digital wizardry, he’s a fraction of the size of the original Oompa Loompas, and his role in the film is as Wonka’s only comedic rival, an “orange man” who appears in the night to steal Willy’s chocolate as payback for Wonka stealing raw materials from his island while he was on guard. If they make a sequel to this prequel, there will inevitably be more Oompa Loompas, but Grant does his thing so well that one is all you really need.

A world of song and dance, a world of chocolates that make you float, a world of Rube Goldberg devices and orphans and evil chocolate impresarios … in short, a world of pure imagination … it’s all pretty delightful, and yet over the course of more than two hours, the bloom does come off the rose a bit. There isn’t any one bit of Wonka that’s too long, per se, but the current era of moviemaking just can’t seem to give us light confections if it can give us heavy ones. In all parts of its conception and most parts of its execution, though, this is a pretty nice treat, and just the sort of thing to accompany Christmas – when the business of selling chocolate is booming indeed.

 

Wonka is currently playing in cinemas.