Mild Spoilers Ahead: Maybe other people have less distaste for this, but I hate Dickensian stories where innocent, kind-hearted, naïve protagonists are tricked into/press-ganged into perpetual slavery. Did the filmmakers think the cartoonish performances from Oscar winner Olivia Colman and Tom Davis (as Scrubitt and Bleacher) would dilute/soften the peril? It didn't for me. Was the song where all the wage slaves sing about their perpetual toil supposed to make their fate seem less sad and permanent? Again, not so much.
Then there's Noodle (Calah Lane). Am I crazy but is this offensive - her uncle kidnaps his newborn niece from his sister-in-law, then attempts to murder the baby, and then she's condemned to perpetual slavery, and this is a Black girl?!
Beyond Scrubitt and Bleacher, Wonka's other adversaries are the three evil chocolatiers in London. The dynamic between Wonka and Slugworth, Prodnose, and Fickelgruber remains static until the very last possible moment of the movie: Wonka attempts to sell his chocolates, the SPF use their corrupt power to challenge Wonka. Wonka refuses to give up, SPF challenge him again, forward, reverse, forward, reverse, until SPF finally bribe Wonka, then double-cross him and attempt to murder him twice.
There's plenty of movies where the hero or the adversary are outsmarted by their rival. It can be a fun surprise once or twice, but after too many setbacks, the audience gets tired. "After being fooled over and over, why can't they think more than one step ahead for a change?" (This was my complaint about the later Bourne movies. The corrupt intelligence hive back in America refused to think two steps ahead, the franchise just became stimulus/response/outsmarted over and over.)
Wonka repeatedly is challenged by SPF, culminating in Wonka opening his first shop...without anticipating that SPF would challenge him as they had been doing over and over. We in the audience all did. By the time Wonka is nearly murdered the second time, I felt he was too dumb to deserve to survive. All this from a character in the beloved Gene Wilder movie where Wonka is characterized as a unpredictable prankster who outsmarts everyone.
Maybe you think I'm not being fair. After all, Paddington 2 was my favorite movie of 2017, and Paddington is unjustly sent to prison in that one! That's a fair point, but Wonka felt more to me like Paddington 1, whose only flaw was Nicole Kidman and her too-creepy plot to murder Paddington and stuff him for a museum exhibit. We couldn't show her parts to our kids because it was too dark. All the murder and enslavement in Wonka hit me the same way.
I am okay with bring in the minority on this one. Maybe everyone else was charmed by Wonka. The songs were good, the cast charming, even if there's no explanation for the panoply of accents. All the murder and slavery left a bad taste in my mouth. My Stub Hubby Grade - D. (streaming on Max)