Criticism-proof (Spoilers)

This movie's premise tells you everything you need to know, and basically any criticism levelled at the movie won't penetrate its asinine armour. I think this is both a positive and a negative.

It's positive because it gave me what I wanted. I heard the premise, "Nic Cage fights Chuck E Cheese robots," and went, "Yes". That's what I got.

The negative to that, though, is that the film kinda can skate by and doesn't need to shore up the rest of the premise.

So, I can talk about the stupid characters who make dumb decisions (those teenagers are well aware of the Satanist-possessed robots, but decide to make it in the middle of Willy's Hell-room, anyway!?), or the nonsense timeline (the Janitor can clean half of Willy's for two hours, during which time the kids manage to get from Liv's house to the Wonderland), or even the gaping plotholes (the townspeople decided to do what?), but to complain is to simply have the movie shrug and point to the premise again.

And yet, the movie would be near-perfect if it cleaned up those plotholes. It's almost like it overthought the whole thing. Have the kids find out about Willy's more recently, make the townspeople a bit more "evil cult", just edit the movie differently so the time jumps aren't as much of a problem (etc.), and you've got the best film it could have been.

Weird as it sounds, Willy's Wonderland both fulfills its premise to a T, and fails to fully explore its subject matter. It didn't live up to its full potential? That's weird...