"Charlie and the Chocolate Factory"

The other kids, as anyone who has read Dahl's books or has seen the earlier movie knows, are hateful brats whose indulgent parents haven't done them any favors, and they meet nasty (although not deadly) fates at Wonka's hands. Wonka, as Depp plays him, is hardly the kind of guy you'd entrust your kids' welfare to: A potential sociopath in a velvet coat and bright purple latex gloves, he speaks in a sugary, clipped, robotic singsong; his skin has a greenish-gray cast; and his eyes, beneath his Prince Valiant haircut, twinkle with demonic blankness.

Depp's Wonka is scary as heck, but not necessarily because he seems like a child molester. Some critics and smartypants onlookers have noted that the character bears a creepy and unfortunate resemblance to Michael Jackson, but to me, he's much more like Phil Spector, a wacko soft-spoken prince who spends his days pacing his prisonlike palace. Depp's performance isn't bad; it's just so carefully pruned, like a sharply tailored topiary bush, that it feels more like character design than a performance. When he fixes his glazed stare on the little tykes he's squiring around his vast, psychedelic-colored factory and observes, "You're all quite short, aren't you?" it's enough to coax a shuddering laugh out of you. But past a certain point, the performance feels like shtick, a tired riff on one uncomplicated idea. We don't necessarily have to like Willy Wonka, but should just looking at him give us a headache?

Burton has fleshed out Dahl's story to some degree, giving us more information about Wonka's background than we perhaps care to know (he has some daddy issues, and you would, too, if your father was a dentist played by the marvelously authoritarian Christopher Lee). And while the candy factory is something of a visual marvel -- including a landscape of mushroomy-looking gumdrop trees and a shiny fuchsia Viking ship with a curvy seahorse at the prow -- the opening and closing sections of "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" are the ones that work best. In other words, the scenes that take place in the impoverished Bucket household are more effective, emotionally, than anything else in the movie. With a few notable exceptions ("Pee Wee's Big Adventure" among them), Burton is better with the infinitely variegated palette of grays than he is with candy colors -- bright colors don't seem to fire his imagination as much as dark ones do.

But maybe the myriad flaws of "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" are simply the downside of genius. There are sequences in "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" that are as nutcase-dazzling as anything Burton has ever attempted. Burton tells the back story of how Wonka recruited the Oompa Loompa tribe, from Oompa Loompa land, to work in his factory. (The Oompa Loompas are all played by one actor, the marvelously expressive Deep Roy.) In a sequence straight out of a Bob Hope/Bring Crosby "Road" movie -- with all the now-forbidden political incorrectness that implies -- Burton shows us Wonka communicating with the Oompa Loompa leader, in a combination of meaningful grunts and improvised sign language. The movie's ambitious production numbers, featuring jillions of computer-generated Oompa Loompas, are clear, affectionate homages to Busby Berkeley (as well as the aforementioned Esther Williams).

And then there are those squirrels, with their alert ears and fluffed-out tails. The reality is that not all of these nut-inspecting prodigies are real, live squirrels. According to the movie's press notes, Burton had his heart set on using live squirrels for the scene, but squirrels, though smart, are independent-minded little buggers and difficult to train. (In addition to the fact that their physiology prevents them from tossing nuts, or anything else for that matter, over their little shoulders.) So Burton had to settle for an artfully filmed combination of real squirrels and computer-generated and animatronic ones. You can kind of tell the difference, but it doesn't much matter. As jaggedly problematic as it is, "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" couldn't have emerged from anywhere but the dark, chambered nautilus of Burton's imagination -- in its best sections, it's magically deranged in a way no other filmmaker could even come close to pulling off. The candyman can.

• View blog reactions