As the sad-faced Oompa-Loompas who acted in Glasgow’s famously catastrophic Willy’s Chocolate Experience in 2024 will testify, if you come at Willy Wonka, you’d better not miss. There’s always a risk involved when trying to recreate fantastical, fictional worlds: if you fall short – or miss the point – the bathos is all the more devastating. Roll up, then, for Wonka’s Golden Ticket, Netflix’s twist on Roald Dahl’s confectionary phantasmagoria, which reimagines the story as Squid Game: The Sugar Headache. It gets messy.
As we join our contestants, they’ve assembled outside Wonka’s factory, having found Golden Tickets in apparently random bars of chocolate – although, as a group, they seem fortuitously demographically mixed and able to bring a range of disparate yet complementary backstories to the table. A lucky break. But wait! Is that the voice of beloved Wonka-proxy Gene Wilder?
Almost. As it turns out, the show’s producers (with the approval of Wilder’s estate) have rendered the late actor’s voice in AI form. It sounds stilted, indefinably wrong somehow. Like so much AI, it feels like a solution to a problem that doesn’t really exist – Wilder’s “presence” adds nothing beyond a sort of uncanny-valley queasiness that, of course, should be present in any rendering of Wonka anyway. The sickly scent of decay is already close at hand.
For a group of grown adults who haven’t even ingested anything sweet at this point, the group seem wildly excited. However, the true meaning of the enterprise is about to be revealed: “Whoever reaches the end will walk away with a lifetime’s supply of money. A six-figure salary for 30 years.” Oh, the romance and wonder! In the spirit of the moment, the fact that GeneGPT doesn’t tell them if this money is taxable feels like an omission. From this point on, this bunch have their eyes firmly on the prize. What follows is a weird mixture of infantilisation (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is a kids’ book, guys!) and hyper-capitalist, last-person-standing ruthlessness.
But first, chocolate. Yes, there is a river of it, surrounded by edible grass, edible flowers and presumably, though we don’t actually see anyone on their hands and knees licking the floor, edible paving stones, too. The set-pieces are actually very well realised, even if the show’s value system feels somewhat bleak and desperately recycled.
The first task involves gumballs, some of which cause contestants to disappear. But everything unfolds too slowly. The first time a contender vanishes in a puff of dry ice, it’s deliciously bracing; by the sixth, the producers are just offering you another bottom-of-the-tin Quality Street on Boxing Day evening. This rug-pulling surrealism needs a frantic pace to work, but for the most part, this show wanders around sluggishly. Worse still, it relies on the kind of reality competition alliance-building that keeps everything earthbound. It would have worked better as pure, crazy experience; a metaphorical sugar-addled eight-year-old charging giddily around a candyfloss playground. As it is, we get the nausea without the sugar rush; the cavities without the crunch.
Eventually, everything just feels too familiar and prosaic. The living quarters are nicer than the austere Squid Games bunks but there isn’t room for everyone. This means negotiation. Emotional blackmail. Plenty of boilerplate competition show sequences in which people sit around scowling mistrustfully at each other. Contestant Ziad bellows “Daddy’s home!” upon entering the bedrooms, presumably prompting a shudder of regret and self-loathing in everyone who voted to save him from gumball oblivion. He also has thoughts on where this might be heading. “Going into Wonka-vision 2.0, I want to be prepared,” he solemnly states. He doesn’t appear to be joking. Lighten up, mate, you’re not on The Apprentice. Although actually, maybe you are. So much of this stuff is basically the same fondant fancy in a slightly different wrapper. The prize money raises the stakes but, paradoxically, it often removes the fun.
And so it goes on. There’s a TV show within a TV show. A challenge so gut-churning that one contender threatens to regurgitate their samples of the chocolate river. Another paints a target on their back right from the start, but others (a grandfather and grandson; a devoted father-and-daughter combo) are reality TV-cute.
But finally (much like the challenge version of Squid Game), Wonka’s Golden Ticket seems to point in the opposite moral direction to the creation which spawned it. Don’t expect Charlie Buckets here – doing the right thing, resisting the everlasting gobstopper. Instead, resign yourself to a factory full of Veruca Salts: blithe, easily manipulated, wanting everything right now. Watch them if you must – but brush your teeth afterwards, and keep the Rennies handy.
• Wonka’s Golden Ticket is on Netflix
