TIMOTHEE CHALAMET WALTZES THROUGH THE WHIMSICAL 'WONKA' BUT ROALD DAHL'S DARING IS MISSING

The original 1971 “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” may have been a delicious dream, lined with trees of gumballs and fields of lollipops.

But never has there been a more cautionary tale about the danger of too much of a good thing.

Magical as that Roald Dahl-scripted film was, it remains lodged in our imaginations less for its sugary goodness than the way darkness, satire and even mania ebb around its edges — flowing down that nightmarish watery tunnel and pooling somewhere in the back of Gene Wilder’s eyes. Charlie Bucket and Grandpa Joe may bubble with laughter all the way up the ceiling, but there’s a spinning metal blade up there.

“Wonka,” the latest attempt to revisit Dahl’s masterwork, bears no such danger. It’s going more for the taste of an Everlasting Gobstopper — an ingenious confection that piles flavor on top of flavor. Tasty though that can be, you miss the daring of Dahl in the more wanly whimsical “Wonka.”

Still, the movie has two big things going for it: the charisma of its winning star, Timothée Chalamet, and the dazzling designs of its director, Paul King, the don of “Paddington.” To a large degree, King has applied much of the formula that defined “Paddington” — and that “Godfather Part II” of sequels, “Paddington 2” — to a Wonka origin story that populates a delightfully detailed world with a delightful array of supporting characters (many of whom are “Paddington” veterans). Did I say it’s delightful?

Yet it’s that strain to delight that keeps “Wonka” from achieving liftoff. King’s film is lively but too neutered to do Dahl justice; congenial but not clever enough to match the giddy joy of “Paddington 2.” If Tim Burton’s 2005 film, with Johnny Depp giving Wonka a Michael Jackson spin, leaned into creepiness, “Wonka” goes the opposite direction.