Film Review: WILLY’S WONDERLAND (2021): A Nostalgic Grindhouse Wannabe That Misses Its Exploitation Mark

Willy’s Wonderland Review

Willy’s Wonderland (2021) Film Review, a movie directed by Kevin Lewis, and starring Nicolas Cage, Emily Tosta, Beth Grant, Ric Reitz, Chris Warner, Kai Kadlec, Caylee Cowan, Jonathan Mercedes, Terayle Hill, Christian Delgrosso, David Sheftell, Jiri Stanek, Jessica Graves Davis, Taylor Towery, and Chris Schmidt Jr.

We underestimate just how good Nicolas Cage is at playing cartoon characters.

This isn’t meant as a pejorative dig against his acting … quite the opposite, actually. Cartoons are not inherently simplistic but have the potential to be incredibly complex, as they are essentially heightened and exaggerated reflections of reality. To be cartoonish in the case of a live-action feature is to bring that same level of veracity out of the second dimension and into the third. For example, just look at the off-the-wall slapstick energy that Cage brings to the early Coen Brothers comedy Raising Arizona as the well-intentioned but weak-willed father-to-be, H.I. McDunnough; or the hyperactive sleazeball antihero vibes he brings to boxing fixer Rick Santoro in De Palma’s Snake Eyes.

In Willy’s Wonderland, the new action-comedy-horror film from Kevin Lewis, Cage gives a stoically silent performance as a down-on-his-luck loner forced to clean a cursed restaurant for a full night. He plays it akin to a gunslinger in the Old West, rolling into a southern town and cleaning up its demon-possessed act, and we learn next to nothing about him besides his penchant for caffeine and his strict adherence of break schedules. He feels like he’s been pulled straight off the pages of a comic book, which sorta makes sense when blood sacrifices in a play place make up a film’s core.

Cage is arguably one of the greatest cinematic performers of our time, as he has an ability to imbue all of his characters – regardless of style, genre, or level of prestige – with a manic energy that both accentuates his character’s presence within their film’s universe and makes us aware of the artificiality of the form. To mention De Palma again, Cage’s work brings about a similar metatextual awareness of cinema as a medium in and of itself.

His audacious choice of roles has become a bit of a joke (others might use the descriptor of “shameless” instead), and yet it’s very hard to watch a Cage role and argue for a lack of dedication on his part. Cage use his patent fervor to sink into his roles, melding his own personality with those of his characters, resulting in hybrid portrayals that are familiar and recognizable while always unique time and time again. Say what you will about the films themselves, but Cage himself is never phoning it in.

For better or worse, Cage is the modern-day movie star, and he uses his star power to the most chaotic degree. By doing so, he lays bare the shallow pretension that divides high-brow from low-brow art in the first place. Everything has the same potential for importance as it does stupidity.

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, I’ll follow my own suggestion and say what I want about the films Cage finds himself in: they’re not always that great. Case in point: Willy’s Wonderland, a tongue-in-cheek, one-note take on childhood nightmares that doesn’t live up to – nor even deserve – Cage’s straight-faced craftiness.

The predicament of Cage’s loner comes when he runs a flat in the small southern town of Hayesvills and is short on cash for the repair, so he takes up a local business magnate’s (Ric Reitz) offer of janitorial work at the run-down Willy’s Wonderland as payment. It’s honestly amusing to see how dedicated and undeterred the loner is to his tasks, scrubbing and scraping away at the decades of grime within the dilapidated establishment, punctuated with intermittent breaks of eroticized pinball and greasy melees with possessed animatronics. The situation becomes complicated when the rebellious Liv (Emily Tosta) and her group of friends get caught in the restaurant’s clutches, and Cage’s loner must worry about protecting them and finishing his cleaning tasks already at hand.

Even if the filmmakers claim this script was written before the Five Nights at Freddy’s phenomenon really took off, it’s hard to deny that this 2021 film isn’t riding the coattails of that 2014 video game – especially when a cursory glance at that game’s summary has a lot of similarities with Willy’s Wonderland’s own plot.

(Also, forgive me – I’ve barely used Tumblr in the past five years, so I wouldn’t even know if fanart and screengrabbed gifsets are still making the reblog rounds en masse – but is FNAF still even in the zeitgeist? I know it’s a franchise now, but is it nearly as hot of a topic as it used to be? It seems like it’s barely talked about in the mainstream anymore … which makes its actual film adaptation seem all the more dubious.)

Having not actually played FNAF (forgive me once again, I’m not a gamer), I can only hope said game is actually more robust in its world-building and characterizations than Willy’s Wonderland is, because the latter mostly plays as a prolonged ironic joke.

Lewis and screenwriter G.O. Parsons are working with one gimmick and one gimmick alone, hoping that the horrifying-bastardization-of-‘90s-childhood-relics angle will be enough to buoy the film along. But one can only feign amusement and/or fear from cannibalistic animatronic animals and their grease-for-blood gore for so long. After that, we actually want more out of our cult classic wannabe besides a bloated sense of existence – which, at 88 minutes, is a rather damning realization in and of itself. Outside of the cheap camerawork, the gaudy color correction that puts the rust in “rustic”, and sloppy editing that actually spoils some of the film’s later scares, Willy’s Wonderland’s biggest sin is that it’s just so boring.

And that’s honestly a shame, because Willy’s Wonderland has some fascinating in-house prizes that Lewis chooses to leave buried in its conceptual ball pit.

With the reveal of the restaurant’s cursed history, the film harkens back to the moral panic of the 1980s and 1990s and the overbearing anxiety that came with it, wherein America believed that its children were being lured into the clutches of Satan worshippers at every turn. Tangentially, it also taps into that modern-era mentality of the creepypasta and grimdark online spaces, wherein “lost episode” and “hidden secrets about [x media property]” stir up an anxiety that poisons our nostalgia, making us fear and turn away from that which used to bring us joy. There’s something undoubtedly cynical about all of this – as is the case with all of adulthood – but it can be seen as a collective manifestation of both our society’s own distrust in mass media and a crowdsourced suggestion that nostalgia itself is poisonous, since they’re both utilized by capitalist interests as a hollow means for a consumerist end.

To ask Willy’s Wonderland to earnestly tackle this concept may seem like too big of a demand for a film that’s really just after the contrarian patronage of the anti-fandom viewer, who’s more content with an Internet joke made cinematically manifest than critical dissection. But by ignoring it, the film misses out on a chance to really dive into the various forms of exploitation that moral panics and creepypastas thrive on. Such exploitation is instead viewed superficially as simply an excuse to showcase a bunch of ridiculous mise-en-scene for its own sake, with no reflections on its psychological implications (and yes, that includes both the biological and mechanical gore). And even that doesn’t make for an immediately bad approach, but with the aforementioned shoddy construction and dull fight scenes the hollowness of the film’s conceit becomes inescapable.

All of this snuffs out the bright spots of the film wherein dedicated craftsmanship is evident: mainly, Cage’s performance and the spectacular production design inside the cursed restaurant. Between Cage’s leering loner and all of the anthropomorphic cartoon animals dotting every bit of the interior (including the aforementioned pinball machine), Willy’s Wonderland does invoke a true sense of time and place for anyone who ever went to a Shakey’s or its equivalent in the late ‘90s. Even Tosta is spunky enough to keep up with Cage’s wild presence and adds a fair amount of youthful spite to the mix.

But again, it’s disappointing that the film blocks all this out with its subpar technical aspects and a one-note thematic approach. There are the makings of a worthwhile midnight madness screening in here, but it’s drowned out by shallow amateurism and a clash of interests.

Unless you’re a Cage completist or one who revels in pop-culture-adjacent edginess, this is one mystery that can remain unsolved.

Rating: 3/10

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