Willy's Wonderland: An Underdeveloped Snooze
The “California Klaus Kinski,” Nicolas Cage, is back, and this time he’s fending off possessed animatronic puppets without uttering a single word. In theory, you would think this film would be a stupid-fun blast, but in actuality, it’s an underdeveloped snooze that sleepwalks through nearly every aspect of its production.
A quiet loner (Nicolas Cage) finds himself stranded in a remote town when his car breaks down. Unable to pay for the repairs he needs, he agrees to spend the night cleaning Willy's Wonderland, an abandoned family fun center. But this wonderland has a dark secret that this "janitor" is about to discover…
Nowadays, it’s pretty common knowledge that watching a Nicolas Cage film is a gamble. Occasionally, you’ll roll the dice and find a real winner (like MANDY or to a lesser extent Color Out Of Space), but more often than not (more so as of late), you’ll find yourself coming up with snake eyes (wordplay intended) and feeling a bit burned. Luckily, the bad eggs are pretty easily sniffed out (like Jiu Jitsu or Primal), but every once in awhile a promising-looking Cage vehicle turns out to be a disappointing stinker, even by Nic Cage standards. And on that note, in walks Willy’s Wonderland, an underdeveloped B movie that somehow manages to make Nicolas Cage bareknuckle boxing a gang of possessed Chuck E. Cheese knock-offs into a wholly tedious affair.
And that’s not to say that Cage is the reason why Willy’s Wonderland drags its feet across the whole way through. It’s true that Willy’s Wonderland lacks the Cage-isms that make a sinking ship stay afloat, but it’s not utterly devoid of those Cage moments that make you chuckle and bring a slight smile to your face (like his gloriously silly pinball dance that occurs way too late in the film’s third act); they’re just far and few between. The real disaster is pretty much everything that surrounds Cage, from the piss-poor writing and directing to the cheap cinematography and bad supporting performances. Although he’s not given much to do — aside from drinking soda (as if it were video game health), playing pinball (for some reason), and beating the black goo outta bizarro puppets with zero dramatic tension — Cage taps into the silent-side of MANDY’s Red, coming at this with a slew of face acting and serious stoicism, which at decent as that is, can’t save this shoddy piece of “entertainment.”
The script by first-timer G.O. Parsons is where a bulk of the film’s issues begin. For starters, he overstuffs the story with characters, most of which are two-dimensional mincemeat for the puppets. He spends too much time setting up his two storylines, both of which don’t amount to much of anything (one involving a group of teenagers who want to burn the titular Willy’s Wonderland to the ground, the other being Nic Cage’s janitorial clean-up of the place). It takes about 20-minutes before anything really happens and about 37-minutes for the two storylines to finally converge. There’s also backstory information that’s withheld until the 2nd and 3rd act, which would have been better positioned in the first act, and a whole lot of things that happen that make zero sense (like its fittingly stupid ending). Cage destroys the opposition with no challenge; there’s no stakes or tension. The one actor that should have lines (i.e. Cage), none, and everyone else has bad dialogue or terrible line readings.
The direction and the cinematography don’t help to bridge the gaps in Parsons’ weak screenplay either. For some strange reason, Kevin Lewis shoots a bulk of the film in unmotivated close-ups or in dutch angles that feel out of place. There’s also a lack of establishing shots that set up the geography of locations or the characters within them. He also hardly lets a scene breathe, particularly the fight sequences which suffer from his up-close-and-personal smothering. Considering the film’s budget of 5 million USD (most of which probably went to cover Cage’s salary), you’d expect it to look much better than it does. Psycho Goreman, another B movie released this year, was made for well under a million CAD (only a small portion of which was devoted to creature design), and it totally puts this film to shame in every single respect. A lot of the shots are overexposed or cosmetically altered in a nauseating way. It tries to evoke some of the same atmospherics as Panos Cosmatos’ wholly superior MANDY, but it fully comes up empty.
Overall, Willy’s Wonderland is nothing more than a shameless cash grab designed to exploit the fans of the Five Nights At Freddy’s game, who have been patiently waiting six years for it to be adapted to screen. It’s nothing more than a short film painfully stretched to feature length, and it’s such a tedious slog. It’s hard to believe this half-baked snoozefest scored a passing grade on Rotten Tomatoes, when we all deserved much much better.
Recommendation: If you haven’t caught this one already, go ahead and wait for it to hit streaming or pass on it altogether.
Rating: 1 Nic Cage pinball dance outta 5.
What do you think? We want to know. Share your thoughts and feelings in the comments section below, and as always, remember to viddy well!