Charlie Bucket comes from a poor family, and spends most of his time dreaming about the chocolate that he loves but usually can't afford. Things change when Willy Wonka, head of the very popular Wonka Chocolate empire, announces a contest in which five gold tickets have been hidden in chocolate bars and sent throughout the country. The kids who find the tickets will be taken on a tour of Wonka's chocolate factory and get a special glimpse of the wonders within. Charlie miraculously finds a ticket, along with four other children much naughtier than him. The tour of the factory will hold more than a few surprises for this bunch... [TRAILER]

STEVEN SNYDER'S REVIEW

Don’t be mistaken – Tim Burton’s 2005 adaptation of the Roald Dahl classic may have cut Willy Wonka from the title, but “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” is still very much a story obsessed with Wonka himself.

This is a Johnny Depp film, and a fantasy that flies on the surreal energy he is able to extract from almost any role. From hermit to pirate to reclusive author to now all-but-insane candy factory owner, he is one of those indescribable acting forces who is incapable of being reduced to a type.

And Burton’s obsession with Depp’s Wonka is both the film’s charm, and its Achilles heel. Wonka the character emerged, through the great Gene Wilder, as the most unexpectedly perverse and bizarre character of the 1971 film – a performance which made the original the hit it is. But to focus in too close is to lose a bit of the mystique, mystery, absurdity and deliciousness.

Tragically, by the end of this second chocolate high, we kind of have Wonka figured out.

Which is not to say the entire journey is predictable. Burton, equipped with an array of special effects and technology that director Mel Stuart could have only dreamed about some 34 years ago, goes to work in reinventing the “Chocolate Factory” landscape. Whereas Stuart’s factory felt like a string of cardboard-sized children’s paintings, Burton’s version feels as if those paintings have been stretched, amplified and digitized into a dreamscape of an entirely new order.

Outside the factory, the world is more bleak and drab, but inside Burton’s more colorful imagination runs loose. There are rivers and waterfalls of chocolate, elaborate static white rooms for science experiments and a room full of, what else, super-intelligent squirrels.

Yet while these smaller strokes are distinctly different, the big strokes remain much the same. Five kids win gold tickets to enter the mysterious world of Willy Wonka and his elaborate chocolate factory, only to be picked off one-by-one by a factory owner who is, at best, eccentric and, at worst, sadistic. Charlie (Freddie Highmore) is the poorest and purest of the children, there solely for the love of candy. He’s joined by a binge eater and a spoiled girl from a rich family, as well as the film’s two new dysfunctional stereotypes: The angry, brilliant video game player and the hyper-competitive gum chewer with the overpowering mother.

They’re also joined by an all-new foreboding army of neon-wearing Oompa Loompas, who this time show off disco moves and sing rock-and-roll.

And it still takes nearly 45 minutes before we are introduced to the man the whole world wants to meet. In an admirable performance some would have thought impossible, Johnny Depp measures up to the legend of Wilder and projects a vastly different version of Willy Wonka. Wilder’s Wonka was an erratic and unpredictable enigma. Depp’s Wonka simply seems broken. Something’s loose in the wiring, and his hyper, euphoric demeanor is funny because it’s so extreme and abstract. His face, always cast in gray, smiles a bit too much, makes a few too many jokes as his visitors meet with unfortunate accidents, but then also reverts to a lonely stare that’s usually accompanied by a flashback.

It’s a wonderfully effective and commanding performance, but its inherent problems are the same ones afflicting of the film. It’s a bit too commanding; by the end the mystery has been sucked out, all the questions answered and mysteries revealed. We finally understand his quirks, his games, his motives and even his factory.

Couldn’t some of this have been left, unanswered, behind the curtain of the absurd? If this “Chocolate Factory” starts as a bizarre, tempting treat, it ends as an overdone stomach ache.

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