Willy's Wonderland (2021)

directed by Kevin Lewis

USA

88 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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Willy's Wonderland is a film I've been waiting for since it was announced because the entire idea of it is just so ridiculous it had to work. Also, you put Nic Cage in a movie and it automatically makes it A Nic Cage Movie™️, especially now, since he's garnered fame to the point that he's basically known for being himself and you cannot see him as anything else. So any movie with him in it kind of has to be tailored around the fact that he's now a persona as much as an actor, and Willy's Wonderland is very successful in utilizing his aura to its fullest extent. He plays a silent drifter with no background who gets roped into serving a shift at the titular restaurant, which is filled with a cast of demonic animatronics who try relentlessly to kill him and anyone else that enters the building in a cycle that has been in place for a long, long time. I'm not sure how much of it I should get into here to keep things interesting without spoiling it, but there is a decent amount of lore, which I really appreciated because, again, due to the inherent silliness of the idea of a grown man battling animatronic animals, the rest of the movie should be constructed carefully to be just believable enough to work with the concept, but not so extensive that its presence wouldn't be better than no backstory at all.

The movie itself looks just a little bit rough around the edges, which was, again, fitting for the kind of thing it is. I think this is a B-movie at heart- it's important that it didn't look too glossy and over-polished. A lot of care was obviously put into the suits and the graphics and the accompanying jingle created to rival the annoyingness of the "Pooka!" song from Into the Dark, but the color grading also looks kind of ugly sometimes and I couldn't get over how the whole thing was filmed in fish-eye. And that's fine. It all makes sense in context.

The centerpiece of this whole thing is really Cage's character. The band of random youths who try valiantly to get him out of the building before they can get their arson on, not realizing that the animatronics were stuck in there with him and not the other way around, could have easily been the main cast in a less-good film. Which would have been boring. Having the drifter be the central character, giving him such a distinct personality and then not explaining anything whatsoever about why he is the way he is was what cinched the deal to take this from a boring, derivative movie to something really entertaining and funny.

Personally, I read Nic Cage's character as undeniably autistic. I loved this because even though it was never stated outright, it would be a rare occasion where an autistic person is depicted as being better suited to a situation because of their autism, instead of not fitting into the world the way autistics are usually portrayed. Hear me out: He is told to do a job (clean up the restaurant) and he does said job 100% perfectly with extreme focus, despite the distraction of repeated assaults by evil animatronics. Every so often he has to go and do his ritual of drinking an energy drink and playing pinball for a bit. He obviously has some form of selective mutism. And the last remaining animatronic hits a button to activate flashing lights and loud noises, which overwhelms him- and which would disorient anybody, but it's the one single thing that actually seemed to lower his defenses for a second. Those are all behaviors that read, to me, as super indicative of autism, and this is my headcanon and I am holding onto it because I love it.

This is getting long and probably makes no sense, so I'll wrap it up by saying that I really did like this movie and how it never tries to be more than it needed to be. There's story and action in equal measure, and it's all pulled off with enough skill that I could believe the restaurant was a chain that exists in real life. The only thing that kept bothering me was that one animatronic who was meant to be a human- all the others were wearing enormous, elaborate animal suits, and the presence of an animatronic who was just a big head on an un-embellished human body felt jarring no matter how many times she was onscreen. But that is honestly not a deal at all in the bigger picture. The other animatronics more than make up for that weird one.