WILLY’S WONDERLAND (2021) * ½

Willy’s Wonderland has a premise that seems like it can’t miss and somehow manages to do so in record time.  Wildly.  Imagine if there was a Chuck E. Cheese restaurant that had a County Bears Jamboree-style band full of animatronic animals that came to life and killed people.  Now imagine that the only man who can stop them is Nicolas Cage.  Sounds promising, right?  Despite the seemingly foolproof set-up, the movie squanders nearly all its potential early on and it begins circling the drain shortly thereafter.  

The problems are numerous.  First off, the killer animatronics are lame and unmemorable.  It would’ve been something if they all had some kind of gimmick, but they are all kind of interchangeable, even if they are all completely different animals (and one Tinkerbell rip-off).  Another stumbling block is that the deaths, while gory, are staged in such a clumsy manner that we can derive little entertainment from the silly sight of the angry animatronic assault.  The shaky camerawork and whiplash editing during these scenes are reminiscent of an early ‘00s action movie.  That is to say, they are nearly incoherent.

Many of the other issues I had with the film could’ve been easily forgiven if it had managed to be entertaining.  Stuff like annoying teenagers, massive exposition dumps, and repetitive kills might not have been so arduous to endure if there was a sense of fun to the proceedings.  No such luck, I’m afraid.

However, the biggest miscalculation by far was taking such a gifted and energetic performer like Cage and asking him to dial the energy down to 0.  What’s worse, is that he doesn’t speak a single line of dialogue in the movie!  This might’ve been an intriguing idea had Cage been allowed to chew the scenery as compensation for his lack of dialogue.  In fact, had he attempted this silent gimmick in a completely different film, it might’ve work.  Ultimately, his Zen-like stare does little to enhance this one.  Heck, even if he had been allowed to go into a full-on Cage Rage and was given all the dialogue in the world, I’m still not sure he could’ve saved Willy’s Wonderland, but it would’ve been, at the very least, memorable.