The Empty Magic of “Wonka”

Tom Luddy, who was the executive producer on Norman Mailer’s 1987 film “Tough Guys Don’t Dance,” once said that he gave Mailer notes about “things in the script that make no sense,” but, for most of them, Mailer said that “we would just have to get by on ‘movie logic.’ ” Such disrespect both for viewers and for the art of movies is the kind that only a successful novelist slumming it in the gaudy halls of the film business could afford. This condescension underlies movies that pass off illogic and omissions as marks of fantasy and imagination—or, at least, as good enough for children. “Wonka,” a new origin story to Roald Dahl’s “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”—leaves me with that sort of dismay. The movie, directed by Paul King, who also wrote the story (and co-wrote the script with Simon Farnaby), depends entirely on a just-so imagination. Its convenient wonders just happen to advance its action in ridiculous ways, which serve solely to set up the specific conflicts, resolutions, and set pieces that yield the emotions and the songs that the movie is selling.