Willie’s Wonderland tells the story of a drifter locked inside of a decrepit kids entertainment center that is haunted by demonically possessed animatronics. Willie’s Wonderland is the new flavor of the month this was a trailer that dropped to a little less than a month ago.
Essentially you get crazy, you put him inside of a chucky cheese and all the animatronics are trying to kill him and he has to survive the night.
On paper, sounds pretty cool that’s all is needed to know. Finally checked the movie out on friday when it dropped and now we are here to tell you whether or not it was worth the hype or not.
Nick Cage is a funny guy, he’s a funny actor and a funny legacy. This is a guy that started just throughout his entire career, he’s had different little shifts these different eras, he was doing a lot more of these quirky dramatic pieces, even got the oscar at one point then we have his 90s action era with movies like The Rock, Conair and Face-off which is our favorite.
He went to do more dramatic stuff like adaptation, then he was doing direct to dvd stuff for a while. He was just off the rails and gone from Hollywood and he is making a comeback the past five or six years by doing these really strange b-movies which is a kind of grindhouse level films.
He just takes his personality of the caricature. It just takes on these little wild concepts like mandy, like color out of space. The movie that we just watched on sundance and absolutely hated, prisoners of the ghost land and now this one.
Being honest as much as it always seems on paper to be a good idea whatever movie he’s doing, most of the time people walk out disappointed so does this movie follow that trend or does it finally break the mold and give us something that nicholas cage is destined to play.
Positives about Willy’s Wonderland
We just love the concept, we didn’t even need to see the trailer because the concept is very good. We have an actor shoved into a kid’s entertainment center locked in there and the animatronics come to life because they’re possessed or they’re demons or whatever the truth was going to be revealed.
They’re trying to kill him, he has to kill them back, that’s got to be entertaining to watch and it’s a very cool concept. They pretty much realize fullest potential in this movie. If you were there for the concept, the movie does deliver well on that
The backstory, the lore that they give about why Willy’s Wonderland is haunted, why these different animatronics are coming alive, trying to kill people. You just get a little hints of it throughout the movie with different side characters and then eventually, there’s this revelation to where you get the sparkle motion chick who messes up every situation and every movie that she’s ever been in.
She’s the sheriff of the sheriff’s deputy and she has this little monologue where she tells the story of Willy’s Wonderland and when they gave us the answer oftentimes this is a dividing point in movies like this to where you’re either like “oh that answer kind of sucks” or like “okay that’s actually pretty cool that’s interesting, i dig it”.
The score in the soundtrack was actually pretty good in this too. Unlike, a huge standout but it certainly complements what you’re going for with this. Willy’s Wonderland even has its own little theme song that you probably will get stuck in your head by the end of the movie.
It’s that halloween three season of the witch curse but it does work well with the situations going on, you’re having fun when you’re supposed to have fun there’s creepy little music tones whenever they’re supposed to be whenever you’re having fight scenes that music amps you up.
Though this is one of a list of movies that we expected to sound great in concept, it sounded perfect for Nicholas Cage, to be the guy to bring it to you and walk out of it very disappointed.
This is a movie that a lot of people are really gonna enjoy they’re gonna take it for what it is and just have a mildly good enough time with it and that’s going to be satisfying enough for them.
Missed opportunity in Willy’s Wonderland
The main one, we were absolutely baffled with that actually started to annoy throughout the movie and then We walked away thinking, why would you do that? Nicolas Cage does not say one single word this entire movie, his character’s whole shtick is that he just looks and stares and communicates like that.
There’s even little jokes about it like “ah he doesn’t talk much”. It’s like why would you hire Nicholas Cage for a mute character if you did not learn your lessons from x-men origins wolverine.
If this was a bigger budget movie you would expect somebody like the rock or dave batista to take this role because they’re huge, they’re big, they’re gonna mess things up and that’s the only thing you have to get across with this character. You don’t cast Nicolas Cage for that character.
Second biggest problem is that the editing was trash in this movie we don’t often say trash when it comes to editing but it was absolute trash whenever you get to the scenes that you clicked on this movie for Nicholas Cage fighting animatronic b or c or d.
You have a fight scene, you have him kicking ass, oh is he going to make it out alive, how is he going to win, what’s going to happen and every single time it got to that scene the camera would start doing the shaky champ jittery and it would also have this little blurred lsd effect so you could barely even tell what the hell is going on in these scenes.
When you have a movie like this where the entire crux of the concept is Nicholas Cage fighting demonically possessed animatronics, you want those scenes to be in focus. How hard is it to choreograph fights with a robot? You had to shaky cam that this is not a noob, this is Nicholas Cage Fighting Chuck-e-cheese.
The final negative with this is that the overall structure of the movie is very repetitive. The great fight scenes could have broken that up but since it was nauseating the way that they decided to edit this and film this to the point where we walked away from this film with a headache.
The basic structure of the movie is you have Nicolas Cage in this Willy’s Wonderland place. He goes to clean something, his alarm goes off in his watch, he goes and opens up purple soda, sucks it down, crushes the can, throws it in the trash can and plays pinball.
This structure right there, leads up to a boss fight and it just washes, rinses and repeats the exact same sequence of events about five or six times in this movie to the point where he’s actually walking into a fight. It’s just kind of lazy and annoying.
Final words – Review Willy’s Wonderland
This is going to be a love or hate movie, this is a movie that you’re either going to walk into and say “man that was an absolute blast, that was exactly the bee movie cheese that i needed” and then you’re going to get other people like “wow, that concept had so much potential”
It just felt like you were trying to have surface value b-movie 80s vibes to it but not really landing the heart and the soul of why we have so much nostalgia for that era
For that type of filmmaking, when you have a concept about Nicholas Cage fighting animatronics, you need to have a fully realized Nicholas Cage and you need to have great memorable fight scenes and this movie doesn’t have either of those.
If you love the concept, we would wait until this thing is cheaper to watch online. It is not recommended to pay the full early access price for it but definitely check it out. If you’re somebody that is looking forward to fully explosive Nicholas Cage or great zany memorable fight scenes, this is not the movie for you. so wait until it’s uploaded on putlocker then stream it.