My prayer going into Wonka was “Oh please don’t let Willy Wonka be portrayed as just a nice young man with big dreams.” So of course, that’s exactly what we get in the new musical prequel to the 1971 classic Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, in which Timothée Chalamet takes on the title role. But an important correction — Chalamet’s Willy Wonka is a nice young man with big dreams and floppy hair and large melting eyes so that young women can sigh over him, and that’s the demographic driving the movie’s strong box-office numbers.

It hardly matters to Chalamet fans that he can’t really sing or dance, though this is technically a musical. His sweetly aspirational Wonka first comes ashore clinging to the mast of a ship and breaking into a dull song about hope (or something) in an uncertain, quavering tenor. In general, the new songs are terrible, except for a mildly amusing, energetic one called “Scrub It.” It makes for a sad comparison with the quite memorable one from the original 1971 version, written by Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley, which included “The Candy Man” (a big popular hit for Sammy Davis Jr), “I’ve Got a Golden Ticket,” “Pure Imagination,” and “The Oompa-Loompa Song.”

It’s impossible to watch a character named Wonka wearing a top hat and colorful velvet frock coat and not to be haunted by Gene Wilder’s brilliant, superbly confident portrayal of Willy Wonka in the 1971 adaptation of Roald Dahl’s classic children’s novel that’s defined the character for decades. Wilder played the role like a man possessed of a vision. It was Wilder who came up with the main action of Wonka’s introductory scene, featuring the reclusive chocolatier emerging from his factory before cheering crowds that go silent as he limps stiffly and solemnly down the red carpet, leaning on a walking stick that is revealed to be a comic prop when he suddenly does a brisk somersault and rises with a smile on his face.