Younger, sweeter and significantly less weird than his prior screen incarnations, the latest Willy Wonka — played by Timothée Chalamet — sets off on his adventure with a dream and a smile. For the next two hours, he keeps smiling, while sometimes singing, kind of dancing and concocting idiosyncratic treats like chocolates salted with, as Willy explains, “the bittersweet tears of a Russian clown.” Called hoverchocs, this particular delectable sends its nibblers flying. Alas, they weren’t given out at the press screening so I remained earthbound.

Movie franchises live forever, it seems, hence “Wonka,” a new musical origin story set in an earnest key about the first business ventures of the young Willy. It’s a bright, light movie — in palette and temperament — that’s stuffed with talented performers who seem to be having a pleasant time, even when pretending to be meanies. Its most distinctive quality is that it’s nice, with scarcely a hint of the misanthropy that burbles through Roald Dahl’s “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” the 1964 best seller that generated adaptations in assorted media, including two earlier films and a Broadway musical. (This movie has different music.)

Dahl’s novel and its two film adaptations feature an impoverished boy, Charlie, “a good sensible loving child” who pays a life-changing visit to a chocolate factory owned by the mysterious Willy Wonka. Directed by Paul King, “Wonka” turns back the clock to when Willy was a striver with near-empty pockets and a suitcase filled with enchantments. After years of sailing the world, he pursues his toothsome dreams in a Euro-ville pastiche, with a vaulted shopping arcade and a plaza large enough to hold big musical numbers. He soon encounters hurdles in the form of a cartel and a hotelier, Mrs. Scrubbit (Olivia Colman), who — in a plotline that mirrors one in the novel — hoodwinks guests into servitude.

Sign up for the Watching newsletter, for Times subscribers only. Streaming TV and movie recommendations from critic Margaret Lyons and friends. Try the Watching newsletter for 4 weeks. “Wonka” has songs, old and new (the most memorable are from Mel Stuart’s 1971 film), dance numbers, a river of chocolate and no surprises. Among its least surprising attractions is Chalamet, an anodyne dreamboat who delivers an enthusiastic performance with a reedy tenor and awkward kicks, his floppy hair shimmying under Willy’s top hat. As the title suggests, Willy is decidedly the star: He enters perched atop a ship’s mast, an elevated position that he retains throughout. And while he soon has a child sidekick, a regulation charmer called Noodle (Calah Lane), the youngest of Mrs. Scrubbit’s indentured minions, it is Willy who now effectively has the role of the wide-eyed innocent once played by Charlie.

Timothee Chalamet's Filmography:

Willy’s affability makes this iteration of the character less like Dahl’s eccentric mad-hatter and more spiritually akin to the gentle ursine protagonist in King’s live-action movies “Paddington” and “Paddington 2.” Like that Paddington the bear, this Willy the candymaker soon finds a supportive community in his digitally enhanced new digs as well as maternal warmth from Sally Hawkins, a scene-stealing foil in Hugh Grant (here as an Oompa-Loompa) and various whimsical escapades that suggest King is as much a fan of Rube Goldberg machines as of storybook confections. The movie is overly busy, as these kinds of eager-to-please diversions tend to be, and at two hours it overstays its welcome.

Written by King and Simon Farnaby, “Wonka” could use more tart notes; at times it’s borderline saccharine. That isn’t surprising given how King has reconceptualized Wonka’s personality (there’s no shiver of menace here) and given too the Disney-fication of children’s entertainment. In the years since the book first hit, Wonka World has changed, notably in the conception of the Oompa-Loompas, the factory’s diminutive workers. Dahl originally made them African Pygmies who Wonka smuggled, but, per one biographer, after the N.A.A.C.P. complained, he ditched their origin story and made them “rosy white.” The 1971 film with Gene Wilder, in turn, gave them orange skin and green hair, a makeover that Tim Burton ditched for his 2005 movie starring Johnny Depp and that King has restored.

One of the trickier problems that Dahl presents for contemporary filmmakers is finding a way to tap into the pleasures of his work without reproducing its ugliness. The movie skirts some of this simply because it predates Willy’s fame, and maybe by the time the presumptive sequel arrives, the Oompa-Loompas will have formed a trade union. By then, I hope that Dahl’s contempt for fat characters, which the movie echoes in some unfunny business with a gluttonous police chief (Keegan-Michael Key), will also be a thing of the past.

Those bits are seriously unfortunate in a movie that otherwise embraces niceness with unforced sincerity as it invites you to let your imagination run loose, never more amusingly than with the idea that one day Timothée Chalamet will turn into Depp or, if we’re lucky, Gene Wilder.

Read More Reviews of Wonka:

Los Angeles Times, Review: A winning Timothée Chalamet, less sly than sweet, turns ‘Wonka’ into his own playground

“Wonka,” the new musical origin story of everyone’s favorite chocolatier, is a lot like the confections our protagonist conjures: We don’t need chocolate, but how can we resist such a tantalizing treat? We don’t need a musical origin story of Willy Wonka, but how can we not chomp down on this whimsical and wonderful tale, crafted by “Paddington” and “Paddington 2” auteur Paul King and starring Timothée Chalamet? Don’t even try to say no. Just enjoy the indulgence.

Rolling Stone, ‘Wonka’: Timothée Chalamet Bites Off More Than He Can Chew in This Dizzying Musical

They were all young once: Don Corleone and Darth Vader, Butch and Sundance, Hannibal and Leatherface, Maleficent and Cruella. And long before he was the world’s best-known chocolatier and distributor of life-changing golden tickets, William “Willy” Wonka was just a twentysomething kid with a top hat, a sweet tooth, and a dream. For decades, we could only guess how the bright-eyed lad became the candymaker-in-chief. This is where Wonka comes in. A prequel that seeks to both fill in the blanks regarding Roald Dahl’s eccentric sugar pimp and give this generation the Willy they deserve, this look back at the origin story of a kid’s-movie icon is determined to win you over by wearing you down. We all know that every buzzy sugar rush is inevitably followed by a crash. This movie somehow makes you feel as if you’re experiencing both the high and the low at the same time.

AP News, Review: Timothée 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.

The Guardian, Wonka review – Timothée Chalamet’s Chocolate Factory prequel is a superbly sweet treat

On paper, it is the worst possible idea: a new musical-prequel origin myth for Willy Wonka, the reclusive top-hatted chocolatier from Roald Dahl’s 1964 children’s story Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, who decides in the onset of middle age to offer five Golden Tickets at random for kids to look round his secret confectionery paradise, staffed by a slave labour workforce of Oompa-Loompas.

NPR, 'Wonka' returns with more music, less menace

Before there was Elf on a Shelf, looking down on children to punish the bad and reward the good, there was Willy Wonka. In the novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and in the film Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, Wonka brings five children on a tour of his candy factory. Four of them are deemed bad (one is spoiled, one watches too much television, one is fat, one ... chews gum?) and find themselves ejected from the factory in humiliating ways. Only the good boy, Charlie, remains to collect his reward.

Variety, ‘Wonka’ Review: Timothée Chalamet Makes a Winning Willy Wonka in a Fun Prequel That’s One of the Squarest Movie Musicals in Decades

Every fan of “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” (1971) loves the scene where Gene Wilder, as the mystical candy maker, takes his guests on a psychedelic tunnel ride, zooming through the bowels of the Chocolate Factory as he chants a little verse (“There’s no earthly way of knowing, which direction we are going…”), getting angrier and more hysterical by the second. Wilder’s Wonka was a sweetheart, but he had a hidden maniacal side. And in “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” Tim Burton’s majestically wacked 2005 remake, Johnny Depp, then at the apex of his movie stardom, went full Depp, playing Wonka like some louche vampiristic cross between Anna Wintour and Michael Jackson.