Movie Review: Alice Through The Looking Glass

The inconsequential, obligatory Alice Through The Looking Glass will leave drowsy viewers wondering only this: Where’s Johnny? What happened to the actor they once loved?

Going back to the well has worked out just fine for Disney, be it plundering their library of animated fairytales for profitable live-action updates (Cinderella, The Jungle Book, Maleficent) or pumping out a steady stream of Star Wars and Marvel movies until, presumably, the heat death of the universe.

It helps that their projects, mostly, turn out good, even when all common sense initially suggested otherwise. (See: Into The Woods; no, seriously, see it.)

But for every Frozen there is a Tomorrowland, and it’s with the latter company that James Bobin’s Alice Through The Looking Glass belongs.

Its predecessor, 2010’s Alice in Wonderland, was so lifeless it warranted a DNR. However, it also grossed a billion dollars at the box office, and unless your flick is about the historical sinking of a giant ocean liner, you don’t make a billion dollar-grossing picture and not plan for a sequel.

Still, six years later, the creative team of director Bobin, producer Tim Burton and screenwriter Linda Woolverton struggle to imagine up a good enough reason to have our heroine Alice (Mia Wasikowska) return to her pals in Wonderland. The best they can come up with: “Maybe the Mad Hatter is sad now?”

Urged by that rousing call to action, Alice steals a time machine (called the Chronsosphere) from Time himself (Sacha Baron Cohen), to see if she can’t figure out how to make the miserable Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp) insufferably peppy once again, perhaps by undoing the death of his family. Rhys Ifans – four years younger than Depp - plays the Hatter’s pa, and I’m sure he feels great about it.

While flitting back through the decades, toying with the very fabric of existence, Alice discovers that the White Queen (Anne Hathaway) betrayed the Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter) as a child, accidentally causing the embiggening of her head. Finally, the origin we’ve been waiting for! Needless to say, in Disney’s attempt to produce #content, we have wandered far from Lewis Carroll’s original, iconic texts.

Bobin, who has already resuscitated one flagging franchise (The Muppets), fights a losing battle here, forced to toil in Burton’s shadow, unable to carve out a niche of his own. His safest bet at recovering credit would have been to get this all over with quickly, yet at nearly two hours, Alice Through The Looking Glass is antithetically wasteful of our precious time.

(Burton was off filming Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. His absence ended up being a bigger burden than if he’d been present to half-heartedly helm it himself. We’re left to weigh up two unpleasant options: would we rather this be directed by late-era Tim Burton, or an imitator?)

The special effects, when condensed into trailer form, appeared quite mind-bending and innovative. When not set to Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit”, they’re exposed as being just as hollow as the script. If CGI is not at the service of a story, it’s no more wondrous than an impressive screensaver.

At least the acting’s a little better this time around. Wasikowska, no longer seeming lost in the green-screen thickets, is suitably feisty as Alice, and she’s been costumed in astounding visual concoctions by designer Colleen Atwood (once again, the MVP). The voice cast – including Alan Rickman, briefly, as Absolem, Stephen Fry, as the Cheshire Cat, and Michael Sheen, as the White Rabbit – remain welcome accomplices, and both Hathaway and Bonham Carter go all in on their absurd emotional arc. (Baron Cohen can only do as he is programmed to do: speak with a silly French accent and fall over repeatedly.)

This, of course, brings us to Johnny Depp, whose intrusion into the family film market at the beginning of this century is basically the reason Alice in Wonderland exists. Forward all complaints thusly.

With Pirates of the Caribbean, Disney got in the Depp business, and the studio has stayed there ever since. If it makes cents, it makes sense, and you certainly can’t blame Johnny for accepting paychecks that presumably fund his rabid addiction to necklaces and other such silver accoutrements.

However, the flame that might have been apparent in that first Pirates movie has long since been extinguished. The man who stands before you is no more an actor than he is a professional island-buyer. Though still papered with makeup and always armed with new and exciting accents (foreign to all ears but his own), Depp can no longer lay claim to inhabiting characters or elevating his features with savvy acting choices, as he once did. It’s all caterwauling and eyebrow-dancing from here on out.

In Depp’s filmography, Alice Through The Looking Glass sits between a dog smuggling apology video and Kevin Smith’s Yoga Hosers, in which he plays a French-Canadian detective with a penis for a nose. (His daughter is the star of that latter, which should offer some explanation as to why he participated.)

By the end of Alice, if you had to guess which one of the three he did “for the love of acting”, you’d go with the dog video.

2/5

In cinemas May 26. Rating PG for mild themes; some scenes may scare young children.