Movie Reviews

Not many directors can do 'weird' better than Tim Burton. In Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Burton teams up with Johnny Depp to deliver a wonderfully-weird take on Roald Dahl's already-pretty-strange book.

Johnny Depp continues to impress me with his incredible acting range by playing Willy Wonka as a sort of character I've never seen on screen before. He's childlike in a lot of ways and silly in many others, but he's also got a kind of understated and detached irritableness to him. Furthermore, he doesn't really seem to like children -- even though they're his primary customers.

The other really impressive actor is Deep Roy, a Kenyan actor who, through special effects and makeup, plays all of the various Oompa Loompas in the film. Burton and Roy's take on the Oompa Loompas in this film is both funny and somewhat creepy; I'd be scared if I came across one of them on my own (especially if they were singing).

The children that find golden tickets in their Willy Wonka chocolate bars (thus giving them access to a tour of Wonka's factory) are all appropriately caricature-istic (aside from Charlie, of course) and it's satisfying -- and sometimes a little creepy -- watching them succumb to their flaws inside the factory. Charlie (Freddie Highmore) and Grandpa Joe (David Kelly) are appropriately endearing, and serve as the 'non-weird' focus of the story.

The combination of humour and creepiness -- which I've already mentioned twice above -- is one of the things that makes the film uniquely Burton-esque. The other is Burton's 'demented children's book' visualization of the chocolate factory itself. It all adds up to a very worth adaptation of Dahl's classic book.