Review: 'Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom' lets the old DC universe go out on a positive note, with a hunky and jokey Jason Momoa

Ten years and 15 movies later (16 if you count Zack Snyder’s re-edit of “Justice League”), the DC Extended Universe arrives at its apparent endpoint with “Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom” — and at least we’re going out with a laugh.

Director James Wan, who helmed 2018’s “Aquaman,” creates a fairly rousing spectacle, full of big action moments and serviceable special effects. But the biggest, most watchable effect of them all is Jason Momoa, a frat-boy comedian in the body of an undersea god.

In the five years since the last movie, Aquaman, aka Arthur Curry, has had some changes in his life. One is that he’s now the king of Atlantis, and finding the job is pretty boring — all greeting royal visitors and attending endless sessions with the Council of Atlantis, which won’t let him do any of the kingly things he wants to do, such as establish diplomatic relations with the surface dwellers who don’t know of Atlantis’ existence.

Even more important, though, is that Aquaman is a dad. He and his queen, Mera (Amber Heard), have a baby boy, Arthur Jr., who’s living on land — in part so Arthur’s landlocked dad (Temuera Morrison) can be called upon as a live-in babysitter while Aquaman is beating up pirates and being king.

Arthur learns that an old enemy has returned: David Kane, aka Black Manta (again played by Yahya Abdul-Mateen II). Kane is in search of an ancient Atlantean power that will restore his energy suit. He’s enlisted Dr. Stephen Shin (Randall Park), the hapless marine biologist who’s been searching for Atlantis, to help find this power source in Antarctica. Kane’s plan is to power up so he can take revenge on Aquaman, who allowed Kane’s father to die in the first movie.

Shin helps Kane find that power source: The Black Trident, a weapon of Atlantean myth. When Kane touches the trident, he becomes possessed by an ancient monster bent on reclaiming global power — using a long-banned Atlantean fuel that produces enough greenhouse gases to make global warming happen even faster. (Yes, Momoa — who shares story credit on the movie — is a not-so-secret eco-warrior. So that’s another reason to like him.)

After Kane’s first attack on Atlantis, using some stolen ancient Atlantean tech Shin found in Antarctica, Aquaman realizes the only way to beat Kane is to team up with the last person on Earth he wants to see again: His half-brother, Orm Marius (Patrick Wilson), with whom Aquaman battled for the throne in the first movie. Aquaman must bust Orm out of a desert prison — the first of many set pieces on the way to the big all-the-marbles battle at the movie’s conclusion.

The “we ain’t brothers and we ain’t friends” banter between Aquaman and Orm is pretty good, as action movies go, and Momoa and Wilson have some good buddy-comedy rapport. And it’s fun to see the gang back together, including Dolph Lundgren as King Nereus, Nicole Kidman as the retired queen Atlanna, and even Heard (whose role feels truncated here, possibly focus-grouped out of some big scenes). The weak spot here is the villain — Kane’s revenge motivation is dull, and the backstory to explain the ancient baddie who takes Kane over comes too late and is too sketchy to be interesting. 

Watching “Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom” nearly made me wish director James Gunn and producer Peter Safran, who are now tasked with rebuilding DC’s movie fortunes from the ground up, would consider keeping Momoa around for future installments. He’s got the looks, the muscles and the charm of a happy-go-lucky superhero — it would be cool if somebody would just let him keep doing that.

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‘Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom’

★★★

Opens Friday, December 22, in theaters. Rated PG-13 for sci-fi violence and some language. Running time: 124 minutes.

Review: With the first installment of 'Rebel Moon,' director Zack Snyder pulls out his old visual tricks in a space epic cobbled together from spare parts

With the ungainly title “Rebel Moon - Part One: A Child of Fire,” director Zack Snyder’s new monster-sized science-fiction franchise for Netflix launches with a lot of bombast and big action — but for several reasons, not just the ones hinted at by the title, it feels like an unfinished work.

The movie starts on a bucolic planet, Veldt, and a young woman, Kora (Sofia Boutella), pushing a plow behind a horse-like creature. She’s a resident of a peaceful village — peaceful until a ship from the ruling Motherworld descends, led by the movie’s main villain, Admiral Atticus Noble (Ed Skrein). Atticus demands the village sell most of its grain harvest to his army, and even kills the village’s leader (an unbilled Corey Stoll) to put fear in the other villagers.

Kora is not afraid, and we learn of her backstory that she’s not from this village — but a war-hardened former officer in the Motherworld’s army. The opening narration (by Anthony Hopkins, voicing an enigmatic android) explains that the king of the Motherworld was assassinated, and the power struggle that followed left the nasty Regent Balisarius (Fra Fee) in charge, prompting a rebellion in the outer fringes of the empire.

Gee, plucky rebels going up against a powerful evil empire, fighting wars among the stars — where do Snyder and his co-writers, Shay Hatten (who worked on Snyder’s “Army of the Dead”) and Kurt Johnstad (who worked on Snyder’s “300”), get their ideas? (Yes, the legend is that Snyder pitched himself to direct a “Star Wars” movie, and when Lucasfilm turned him down, he recycled his ideas into this.)

Kora — who takes down the occupation force Atticus left in the village in one of Snyder’s familiar slow-motion action sequences — teams with Gunnar (Michiel Huisman), a villager who has sold surplus grain to the rebel side, to start assembling rebel fighters to fight against Atticus’ main forces when they return. Thus, Snyder engages in some universe-building, as we hop from one thoroughly production-designed planet after another. 

Among those Kora and Gunnar pick up are: A homeless former general (Djimon Hounsou), a vengeful assassin (Doona Bae), a hunky prince (Staz Nair), a rebel leader (Ray Fisher, aka Cyborg from Snyder’s “Justice League”) and a roguish thief and space pilot, Kai (Charlie Hunnam). 

Some of the action sequences Snyder devises are propulsive — my favorite is when Bae goes up against a spider-like creature with a head and thorax (played by Jena Malone) that resembles the Borg Queen from the “Star Trek” franchise. But, too often, Snyder falls into his regular habits, creating empty spectacle that’s quite violent, though bloodless enough to get its PG-13 rating. 

The world-building is all in the visuals, with no attempt to guide viewers from planet to planet — and the character development is much the same, with only Boutella’s Kora provided much depth or explanation of who she is and how she got here. The audience is forced to fill in the gaps, using the clues of other movies Snyder references. And, perhaps the greatest crime of all for an action franchise, there’s absolutely no humor to lighten the heavy material.

As the title tells us, this is the first installment of what has been announced as a two-part epic — the second part, with the subtitle “The Scargiver,” is scheduled for an April release on Netflix. And Snyder has recently said in interviews that this movie, which is two hours and 13 minutes long and carries a PG-13 rating, will have a three-hour, R-rated “director’s cut” released sometime next year. Yes, Snyder himself has succumbed to the allure of “the Snyder cut” that his legion of fans demanded after “Justice League.”

The problem with announcing a “director’s cut” for “Rebel Moon - Part One: A Child of Fire” is that it tells us Snyder was so disenchanted with his movie that he started editing a different version as a distraction. If the director can’t be bothered to pay attention, why should the rest of us?

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‘Rebel Moon - Part One: A Child of Fire’

★★

Starts streaming Friday, December 22, on Netflix. Rated PG-13 for sequences of strong violence, sexual assault, bloody images, language, sexual material and partial nudity. Running time: 133 minutes.

Review: 'The Color Purple' is as difficult to translate to the screen as a musical as it was in 1985

Maybe it’s the case that Alice Walker’s acclaimed novel “The Color Purple,” like Laurence Sterne’s “Tristram Shandy” or Thomas Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow,” is actually unfilmable — and neither Steven Spielberg’s achingly earnest 1985 adaptation nor this new musical version can fully convey the pain and resilience of the story’s protagonist, Celie Harris.

The story spans some 40 years, starting in 1909, with two sisters — Celie (played by Phylicia Pearl Mpasi in the early going) and Nettie (Halle Bailey, recently of “The Little Mermaid”) — living with their father (Deon Cole), who frequently abuses and rapes Celie, and has fathered two babies by her. Early on in this film, Celie gives birth to the second one (Whoopi Goldberg, who played Celie in the Spielberg version, makes her cameo as the midwife), and the father takes the baby away while Celie is still recovering.

Soon after, their father arranges for Celie to be married off to a widower who goes by Mister (played by Colman Domingo). Mister orders Celie — played as an adult by Fantasia Barrino (the one-time “American Idol” champ) — to cook and clean, and take even more abuse than her father gave out. The ultimate act of horror comes when Mister banishes Nettie at the point of a shotgun, separating the sisters apparently forever.

Celie has so internalized her abuse that when Mister’s adult son, Harpo (Corey Hawkins), brings home his confident, headstrong girlfriend, Sofia (Danielle Brooks), Celie tells Harpo that to keep Sofia in line, he should beat her — an idea that makes Sofia furious at Celie. (Those who saw the Spielberg version will remember that Sofia was played, in her movie debut, by Oprah Winfrey, who’s a producer of the new movie.)

Harpo decides to start a juke joint, a place by the river to serve booze and book music acts — and the first act he lures in is the Memphis soul singer Shug Avery (played by Taraji P. Henson). Shug has been Mister’s longtime mistress, and her framed photo has become an object of fascination for Celie over the years. When Shug and Celie finally meet, there is an instant bond, whether sisterly or something else.

What I haven’t mentioned yet – and not because the studio marketing is trying to hide it — is that this version of “The Color Purple” is a full-on Broadway musical, adapted from Marsha Norman’s book of the stage play by screenwriter Marcus Gardley. 

Being a musical exacerbates the difficulty an actor would have portraying Celie, a passive and meek character for so much of the movie’s running time, who finally gets to show her resolve and unbreakable spirit in the final few minutes. It was hard for Spielberg to have Goldberg perform that arc; it’s even harder when you also must give the character songs to sing. 

What director Blitz Bazawule (who worked on part of Beyoncé’s “Black Is King” video album) and the script do is stage elaborate dream sequences to show Celie’s inner thoughts — including a Busby Berkeley-style old Hollywood number when Celie and Shug first meet. Only in the later going, when Barrino gets to belt out the declaration “I’m Here,” does the actor and character finally get to show her fire.

So much of this rendition of “The Color Purple” feels hemmed in by conventions — trying to get across the quiet, nuanced emotions of Walker’s book in a format that demands big, loud declarative moments of showing one’s heart. In spite of the abundant talent onscreen and behind the camera, that emotional gap proves insurmountable.

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‘The Color Purple’

★★1/2

‘Opens Monday, December 25, Christmas Day. Rated PG-13 for mature thematic content, sexual content, violence and language. Running time: 140 minutes.

Review: 'Poor Things' is an absurd masterpiece of a growing mind, centered by a stunning performance by Emma Stone

It’s no small thing to call “Poor Things” the most audacious movie the the Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos has made in the English language — not when that includes such swing-for-the-fences titles as “The Favourite,” “The Killing of a Sacred Deer” and “The Lobster.”

But “Poor Things,” a science-fiction movie in the “Frankenstein” vein that’s also a bawdy sex farce and a satirical journey of feminine self-discovery, tops all of Lanthimos’ past Hollywood work for its audacity and  wit. It’s also a movie that boasts a new level of acting from Emma Stone — someone we loved already, and are thrilled to find has found new mountains to conquer.

When we meet Stone’s Bella, she has the mind of a child. Quite literally. She’s the ward of Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), a scientist with radical notions (for this unspecified but vaguely Victorian era) about how to maintain and prolong life, as evidenced by the odd hybrid animals walking around his London courtyard.

As Dr. Baxter tells his student, Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef), Bella was found floating in the Thames, a would-be suicide. She was dead, but the nearly born fetus inside her was alive. So Dr. Baxter transferred the baby’s brain into Bella’s skull, and has been raising her in the Baxter house. Max, who is soon hired as an assistant, chronicles how Bella goes from baby talk to primitive English in short order. 

Bella learns so quickly that she soon wants more than what Dr. Baxter and Max can teach her cooped up in the house. Bella wants to see the world, so she runs off with Dr. Baxter’s lawyer, Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo). Duncan takes Bella to Lisbon to experience the pleasures of good food and sexual intercourse — she calls it “furious jumping” — both of which Bella discovers she likes to do frequently.

Eventually, though, Bella develops even deeper levels of thinking — through which she discovers such things as poor people, money and morality. She also realizes that Duncan is a rake and a cad, and doesn’t like that she continues to improve her mind through books. When they are dumped off a cruise ship because Duncan has run out of funds, Bella seeks her own adventure in Paris.

Lanthimos and screenwriter Tony McNamara (who co-wrote “The Favourite”), adapting the novel by Alasdair Gray, create a fully realized and quite magical world, which opens in wonder in direct proportion to Bella’s ability to take it all in. It’s a clever trick Lanthimos and cinematographer Robbie Ryan (another alum of “The Favourite”) pull, using black and white, a boxy screen ratio and constricting fish-eye lens when Bella has a baby’s brain, then expanding the vista and the palette as her mind grows. The production design shows equal leaps in creativity, from the wrought-iron machinery of Dr. Baxter’s lab to the luxury of Lisbon.

Lanthimos also surrounds Stone with a colorful supporting cast. Dafoe and Ruffalo are both superb as the extreme personalities in Bella’s life, and Youssef’s calm as the wide-eyed Max balances them well. Other fascinating faces — in roles I won’t divulge here, so you can learn their surprises in turn — belong to Kathryn Hunter (from Joel Coen’s “The Tragedy of Macbeth”), the comedian Jerrod Carmichael, Margaret Qualley, Christopher Abbott and the German legend Hanna Schygulla.

It’s Stone’s performance, though, that brings the wonder of “Poor Things” into focus. She channels all the steps of Bella’s mental progression — from babbling babyhood to sublime intelligence — with precision and wit, but also with warmth and tenderness. Stone finds both the humor and the heartache of Bella’s unique perspective on the world and its people, and creates a performance that is in the stratosphere of acting. It’s a master class in the middle of a masterpiece.

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‘Poor Things’

★★★★

Opens Friday, December 22, in theaters. Rated R for strong and pervasive sexual content, graphic nudity, disturbing material, gore, and language. Running time: 141 minutes.

Review: 'Ferrari' is a fascinating portrait of an auto legend, and how he could file away parts of his life as he pursued the winner's circle

Director Michael Mann’s “Ferrari,” on paper, should not work — not with two Californians and a Spaniard playing the three parts of an Italian romantic triangle, set against the business machinations of one of the world’s signature auto companies. 

However, because Mann (“The Insider,” “Miami Vice” and others) is as driven and audacious as Enzo Ferrari himself, the result is an intense, moving portrait of a man who has compartmentalized his life to get what he most wants in life.

Adam Driver plays Enzo Ferrari, thankfully not in a cradle-to-grave biopic, but in a story — the screenplay is credited to British writer Troy Kennedy Martin (who wrote the 1969 original “The Italian Job” and died in 2009) — that focuses on one pivotal year, 1957. Ferrari’s car company, founded a decade earlier by Enzo and his wife, Laura (Penélope Cruz), is on the verge of collapse, having run up debts because Enzo spends more developing his custom sports cars than rich people spend buying them.

Enzo is working to make a deal with a big backer, the American automaker Ford Motor Co., that will keep the company afloat, and expand their business to making 400 cars a year. To make the sale, though, Ferrari needs to show what it can do in a race, specifically the Mille Miglia, an approximately 1,000-mile race through Italy’s city streets and country roads. Enzo learns, though, that a team from rival Maserati is also entering the race — and they need to win to avoid bankruptcy, too.

To finish the deal with Ford, Enzo needs Laura to sign over her control in Ferrari stock. While she’s meeting a bank manager, she learns a secret Enzo has kept from her for years: His second home, where his mistress, Lina Lardi (Shailene Woodley), lives with their 10-year-old son, Piero (Giuseppe Festinese). This is an emotional blow to Laura, whose own son, Alfredo, died at 24 from a form of muscular dystrophy. 

Between visits with Lina and arguments with Laura, Enzo keeps his focus on the Mille Miglia, by assembling a team of drivers. They include the veteran Italian driver Piero Taruffi (Patrick Dempsey), the British driver Peter Collins (Jack O’Connell) and a hotshot new driver, Alfonso De Portago (Gabriel Leone). Alfonso brings with him more paparazzi than Ferrari already has — because of his love affair with American actress Linda Christian (Sarah Gadon), who had just divorced from Tyrone Power.

Mann puts his focus on Driver’s extraordinary performance. Like a race driver, which he was before Alfredo was born, Ferrari is looking around every corner, calculating the angles, looking for those narrow lanes to move ahead — and Driver’s performance shows us that mind at work, shutting out such distractions as love and grief in pursuit of the winner’s circle.

The capstone of Mann’s direction, though, is the breathtaking re-creation of the 1957 Mille Miglia. Mann captures the speed of the cars, the dangers of the road, and the likelihood of death — not only for racers, but for spectators who get too close to the action. 

“Ferrari” is that rare movie where the visual spectacle matches the emotional stakes underneath. It shows a man balancing tragedy and triumph in the same moment, and it shows the costs he pays for being able to think about one and shut out the other.

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‘Ferrari’

★★★1/2

Opens Monday, December 25, Christmas Day. Rated R for some violent content/graphic images, sexual content and language. Running time: 130 minutes.

Review: 'The Iron Claw' piles a lot of acting talent in an emotionally shallow telling of a tragedy-filled wrestling family drama

It would be glib to call writer-director Sean Durkin’s “The Iron Claw” a family drama on steroids — though it would be accurate, since the musclebound Von Erich brothers, scions of a Texas pro-wrestling legend in the ‘70s and ’80s, are occasionally shown injecting before entering the squared circle.

The description is apt, metaphorically, because this “inspired by a true story” drama amps up the pain and and emotional isolation of the Von Erichs, constantly driving themselves to the brink of athletic greatness and personal tragedy to please their demanding father, to almost unbelievable levels. 

The shock comes after the movie, when you look up the Von Erichs’ Wikipedia entry and find out things were even worse for the Von Erichs than was shown on screen.

The dad’s real name was Jack Barton Adkisson, but his professional name was Fritz Von Erich, and he — played with sharp menace by Holt McCallany — made his bones on the Texas pro wrestling circuit as a “heel,” a recurring bad guy who delighted in the boos of the crowd as he used his signature move, called The Iron Claw, on an opponent’s face. But Fritz never got his shot at the title belt, so he’s raised his sons to do what he could not.

The oldest living son — Jack Jr., we’re told, died at age 6 — is Kevin Von Erich, played by an impressively beefed-up Zac Efron. He’s the strongest wrestler of his brothers, but not the fastest talker. So when the time comes to choose someone to build up for a title shot, Dad picks the next in line, David (played by Harris Dickinson), who’s a good wrestler but even better at talking trash in the pre-match interview.

Kevin confides in his new girlfriend, Pam (Lily James), that he believes the Von Erichs are living under a curse. That belief is solidified by the events shown in Durkin’s script, which involve two more brothers — Kerry (Jeremy Allen White), a discus thrower headed to the 1980 Olympics until the boycott of Russia is announced, and youngest brother Mike (Stanley Simons), whose talents aren’t in the ring but with a guitar.

Durkin, making only his third feature in 12 years (the first two, “Martha Marcy May Marlene” and “The Nest,” are brilliant), finds as much tension at home as on the canvas. The brothers scrap and push each other, each one seeking to outdo each other for Fritz’s approval, which rises and falls on whether they can bring home the belt. Meanwhile, their mother, Doris (Maura Tierney), sternly tries to stay out of the fray — even after tragedies have her worrying about wearing the same black dress to more than one funeral.

There are some powerful performances throughout “The Iron Claw.” Those who haven’t watched Allen in “The Bear” can see his brooding Kerry and understand what the fuss was about. McCallany plays Fritz as a father whose drive for excellence is ripping his family to shreds. And Efron finds the wounded little boy hidden under all those bulging muscles.

Durkin’s style and the strong acting make it even more confounding at the end of “The Iron Claw,” when it’s revealed how basic the story is. It’s like watching a Shakespearean-trained cast perform a Hallmark Christmas romance — so much talent for so little payoff.

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‘The Iron Claw’

★★★

Opens Friday, December 22, in theaters. Rated R for language, suicide, some sexuality and drug use. Running time: 130 minutes.

Review: 'The Boys in the Boat' is a painfully average middle-of-the-road sports drama

Underdog sports movies don’t get more straight-forward than in “The Boys in the Boat,” a true story of strivers battling not only to compete but to beat the many layers of a system stacked against them.

Director George Clooney — who appears in the movie’s ads but not onscreen himself — and screenwriter Mark L. Smith (who wrote Clooney’s “The Midnight Sky”) adapt Daniel James Brown’s book about the real-life 8-man 1936 rowing team of the University of Washington. They were scrappers, battling the rich colleges like Cal and Penn to win the national championship. In 1936, winning the U.S. collegiate title brings a bonus: A chance to compete in the Olympics, in Hitler’s Berlin.

When Joe Rantz (played by Callum Turner) tries out for the junior crew team, he’s not thinking about beating Cal or the Germans. Joe needs a job so he can pay his tuition — and a place to sleep other than an old car in the middle of Seattle’s Hooverville. It’s the middle of the Great Depression, and Joe’s been on his own since was 14. 

It won’t be easy, the crusty coach Al Ulbrickson (Joel Edgerton), tells the young men trying out. There are more than 100 of them, trying for eight slots on the boat, and the training is grueling. Joe gets encouragement from his friends in training — as well the team’s Yoda-like boat builder, George Pocock (Peter Guinness), and a fetching classmate, Joyce Simdars (Hadley Robinson). 

Even if you haven’t read Brown’s book, Smith’s script and Clooney’s direction will make you feel like you have — because every step of the Huskies’ crew journey, and Joe’s path to personal success, feels rote and predictable. There’s even a cameo, during the opening ceremonies of the Berlin Olympics as our boys meet track star Jesse Owens (Jyuddah Jaymes), that plays with a slap-your-forehead level of narrative shamelessness.

Still, Clooney captures the technical aspects of rowing, the difficulty and the exhilaration of it, beautifully. And he has a strong ensemble of young actors to play the Washington team — besides Turner (familiar as Newt Scamander’s brother Theseus in the “Fantastic Beasts” films), the standouts are Jack Mulhern as the shy Don Hume, Sam Strike as Joe’s best friend Roger Morris, and Luke Slattery as the borderline-arrogant coxswain Bobby Moch. 

Let me say that, as a Washington alumnus, it pains me to say “The Boys in the Boat” isn’t as good as it could be. It’s got the muscle in the boat. It just doesn’t have the imagination to move it in the right direction.

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‘The Boys in the Boat’

★★1/2

Opens Monday, December 25, Christmas Day. Rated PG-13 for language and smoking. Running time: 124 minutes.

Review: 'Wonka' captures a surprising amount of the magic of Gene Wilder's 'Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory'

Timothée Chalamet has a big top hat to fill in “Wonka,” an origin story for Roald Dahl’s enigmatic chocolate maker, in which the young star finds the balance between referencing back to the great Gene Wilder’s manic and yearning performance in the 1971 “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” and not copying the master too closely.

The movie’s real candy man — the one who mixes it with love and makes the world taste good — is director and screenwriter (with co-writer Simon Farnaby) Paul King, who captures the same smart humor and whimsical world-building he brought to the two “Paddington” movies.

We first see Chalamet’s Willy Wonka arriving by ship to the big city, after sailing the world perfecting his chocolate creations and ready to spend his 12 silver sovereigns establishing himself in the Galerie Gourmet, where all the great chocolatiers go to sell their wares. Alas, on his first night in the city, he is suckered in by two crooks, Mrs. Scrubitt (Olivia Colman) and Mr. Bleacher (Tom Davis), who get Willy to sign a contract for room and board without reading the fine print.

Soon Willy is stuck with a horrendous debt, which he must work off by washing clothes in Scrubitt & Bleacher’s laundry, along with some of their other victims — including an orphaned girl, named Noodle (Calah Lane), who has been trapped in the laundry since she was a baby.

Willy is convinced that his chocolate will make enough money to pay off not only his debts, but those of Noodle and the others serving in the laundry. Noodle helps him sneak out, so he can return to Galerie Gourmet. Once there, though, he discovers that the chocolate cartel – the big candy barons Slugworth (Paterson Joseph), Prodnose (Matt Lucas) and Fickelgruber (Mathew Baynton) — have a death grip on the market, and control the leading cleric, Father Julius (Rowan Atkinson), and the chocoholic chief of police (Keegan-Michael Key). 

Adding to Willy’s problems is the little orange man who’s following him around and trying to steal his chocolates. He’s played, delightfully, by Hugh Grant — and anyone familiar with the Wilder movie knows not only what kind of creature he is, but what song he’s likely to sing.

Yes, there is singing here. “Wonka” is a full-throated musical, with songs written by Neil Hannon (the main creator for the Northern Ireland band The Divine Comedy). Chalamet’s songs are charming, and well-delivered, but the most catchy number comes when the greedy chocolate makers negotiate the price of their bribe to the police chief.

King is clearly inspired by the trippy visuals of Mel Stuart’s 1971 film, but he’s not hemmed in by them. His depiction of the young Wonka’s world is happily energetic, a confection worthy of its main character. He also brings a wry streak of absurd humor, as well as a lot of heart — as Willy thinks back to his mother (Sally Hawkins) and her lessons in the pleasures of chocolate making.

I’ve always thought “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” to be a one-off, a singular pop-art creation that — mainly because of Wilder’s deliriously insane performance — could never be duplicated. But King and Chalet, with “Wonka,” manage toevoke the same sense of playful wonder that its predecessor did. It indeed shines as a good deed in a weary world. 

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‘Wonka’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, December 15, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG for some violence, mild language and thematic elements. Running time: 116 minutes.