‘Chocolate Factory’ okay timekiller; ‘Fantastic Four’ not so much

When someone decides to make a film based on some other voluminous source material —like, say, a two-hundred page children’s book, or a superhero comic with forty years worth of issues behind it—it’s a given that something has to be lost in the process. Few films, however, remind you of the loss quite as much as recent box-office winners “Fantastic Four” and “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.”

In “Charlie,” legendary “chocolateer” Willy Wonka (Johnny Depp) has announced that five golden tickets have been dispersed around the world, hidden within five of his candy bars. The recipients of the tickets will be allowed a day tour into the esteemed Mr. Wonka’s fabled factory. Thanks to the power of determination, Charlie Bucket (Freddie Highmore), a poor English boy living in a comically slanted shack of a house, attains the fabled item and excitedly awaits the chance to make all his dreams come true. The four other ticket winners represent the Four Deadly Sins for Kiddies: gluttony, the fat chocolate hound Augustus Gloop (Philip Wiegratz); pride, the ultra-competitive gum-chewer Violet Beauregarde (Annasophia Robb); greed, the spoiled rich kid Veruca Salt (Julia Winter); and sloth, the media-fed video game addict Mike Teavee (Jordan Fry).

The movie seems to have been filmed in double-time: it nearly trips over itself to pass by the Golden Ticket prologue in order to enter the chocolate factory and the bread and butter of the film. Once it gets there, however, it maintains that unbelievable velocity, shunting our attention from room to room in a strangely rushed effort to kill off the nasty little children and reach the finish line.

In a scene from the film’s 1971 predecessor, Gene Wilder’s Wonka sings as he contemplates the view of a chocolate river: “If you want to view paradise, simply look around and view it.” Conversely, Burton gives himself no time to stop and smell the roses; perhaps his various musical interludes do not stop the show cold, as they did in the previous film, but at least he could give our brains some time to process all the lavish art direction and CGI he throws at us. Eventually the movie itself seems to tire of its own high-speed histrionics: “Does any of this have a point?” asks the perpetually bored Mike Teavee, along with perhaps all viewers over the age of nine. “Candy doesn’t have to have a point,” Charlie shoots back, and maybe it doesn’t; sadly, good movies usually come equipped with points, and this one is sorely lacking.

“Charlie” does score a few successes, however, in the character of Willy Wonka himself. Rather than Wilder’s maniacal yet loving magnate, Johnny Depp’s Wonka can’t be considered anything more than a creepy, selfish bastard. His entire factory is essentially a testament to himself (just about everything imaginable is stamped with his monogram); as an employer, he’s a cheat and a slavedriver; and his reasoning behind whole Golden Ticket idea sounds just forced enough to essentially reveal it as the most brilliant marketing ploy ever conceived. Depp—wonderful, as usual—brings a hitherto untapped sense of shudder-worthy creepiness to the reclusive candyman; he rarely raises his voice above a lilt, and completes every sentence with an unnerving half-giggle. Depp’s reserved yet wacked-out performance makes the film compulsively watchable; pay attention to every time he descends into a childhood flashback. Few actors can snap between goofy and deadly serious as quickly and as well as he can.

Unfortunately, Tim Story’s “Fantastic Four” cannot boast a single Depp-caliber actor out of its quartet of protagonists—or any positive attributes, really. It starts off promisingly enough; much like “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” it wants to get straight to the point. By the twenty-minute mark, Reed Richards (Ioan Gruffudd) and a motley crew of scientists have already hopped aboard a spaceship, flown into a radioactive storm and become imbued with superhuman abilities. Reed gains the ability to stretch his body to amazing lengths; his ex-girlfriend Sue Storm (Jessica Alba) the ability to become invisible to the naked eye under emotional duress; her smart-aleck brother Johnny (Chris Evans) the ability to ignite into a flying fireball at will; and Ben Grimm (Michael Chiklis) is irrevocably changed into a reclusive stone giant.

But Reed decides that “we can’t use our superpowers in public,” and damn it, they actually follow his instructions! As all the characters sulk around and waiting for things to happen for an hour’s worth of running time, you could probably count the number of superhero exhibitions on one hand. The only one who dares to exploit his powers is Johnny, but of course, he’s written as an obnoxious, extreme sports afficionado with a penchant for oh-my-gosh-isn’t-he-a-rebel one-liners. With every lame quip he spouts, your desire to punch him in the mouth increases.

But it’s all supposed to come together in a great big show-stopping finale, right? After all, the Four’s arch-nemesis, Doctor Doom (Julian McMahon), is present, and hero-villain battles are always worthy of attention. Doom has been lauded by a variety of sources as the greatest of all comic book villains, perhaps because he’s so epically written: he’s the smartest man on Earth, given mastery over science and magic; along the way, he became the monarch of the small European country of Latveria, if only to annoy the hell out of his do-gooder archenemies with diplomatic immunity. So how does his cinematic counterpart turn out to be so boring?

Though he suffers through the same cosmic storm as the heroes (he gains metallic skin and power over electricity), McMahon’s Von Doom just kind of mumbles his way through a series of threats and other various evil things; he doesn’t even don his familiar metallic mask and start pounding on heroes until about ten minutes before the picture’s end. It results in one of the lamest climaxes in recent action movie memory, comprised almost entirely of bodies falling from tall buildings or being thrown across streets. Oh, I suppose all the interesting stuff could wait until the next film, but when you can’t even generate excitement for your first film, what makes you think you deserve a sequel?

And that may be the primary flaw of both this film and “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”—thanks to the ownership of a property with a built-in fan base, the filmmakers take the lazy way out. Each presents the bare minimum of what is necessary to make a movie about its subject, making the whole thing feel like expensive filler. Mild laughs and occasional joys can be taken from “Charlie”; constant yawns and growing derision can be taken from “Fantastic Four.” If you plunk down ten dollars for one of them (or twenty dollars for both of them, God forbid) expecting anything more than that, you may direct your attention to one final quote from Gene Wilder’s Willy Wonka: “You lose! Good day, sir!”