A giggling, sugar-high Johnny Depp may not match
Gene Wilder’s performance in the 1971 adaptation of Roald Dahl’s children’s book – Depp projects lunacy, while Wilder embodied it – but he still turns candy maker Willy Wonka into both a faithful reading of Dahl’s creation and an offbeat invention of his own. The same goes for director Tim Burton, who shares with Dahl an affinity for whimsical misery. Burton doesn’t improve on the earlier picture, yet he offers enough of his own idiosyncratic joys to more than justify this remake’s existence.
