2.5 stars (out of 5)
Tim Burton directed the umpteenth version of Alice In Wonderland back in 2010, and it was a chaotic and grating mess of garish colours and wildly expensive 3D animated visuals that had little to do with dubious old Lewis Carroll’s 1865 book, and this sequel (drawn from Carroll’s 1871 follow-up) goes even further by basically having nothing to do with the original tome. And is that the reason why Burton handed over the reins to director James Bobin (of the two new Muppets movies, some Flight Of The Conchords and TV work with Ali G) this time, and instead only produced? Did he not want to be held entirely responsible for a movie that might make Carroll purists (a real thing, apparently) riot in the cinemas?
Alice Kingsleigh (Mia Wasikowska again) is a bit older now and we first see her as the deeply unlikely captain of a ship under attack by pirates off the Strait of Malacca back in 1874, and she then arrives home to discover her Mum Helen (Lindsay Duncan) being held to financial ransom by that posh twat Hamish (Leo Bill). Everything then naturally leads to her escaping through the looking glass (with help from Absolem, now a butterfly and briefly voiced by the late Alan Rickman in his very final role) back to Wonderland, and it’s here that she meets almost all the characters from the first film.
And they’re a glum lot at first, and they include Tweedledum and Tweedledee (both Matt Lucas), bloodhound Bayard (Timothy Spall), the Cheshire Cat (Stephen Fry), McTwisp (Michael Sheen), Mirana (Anne Hathaway) and others. All are concerned about the (Mad) Hatter (the heavily-made-up Johnny Depp), who’s gone all sad and weird (how can they tell the difference???), and we discover that his real name is Hatter Tarrant Hightopp (???) and that he’s never got over grief caused by the death of his family, who were supposedly killed by the Jabberwock (which is glimpsed but doesn’t talk as original voicer Christopher Lee died during production).
This most un-Carroll-like storyline is then complicated further as Alice decides to steal the ‘Chronosphere’ from Time himself, who’s played with scene-stealing silliness by Burton and Bobin’s pal Sacha Baron Cohen and tends to forget which ridiculous accent he’s using this time out. He’s also sort-of-romancing the still-shrieking Iracebeth or Red Queen, who’s again portrayed with great villainous glee by a strikingly-FXed and massively-headed Helena Bonham Carter (Burton’s longtime partner, of course), and her short scenes with Cohen are the funniest here, before the filmmakers remember to get back to all that irritatingly goofy and gooey plotting.
Lewis Carroll (who’d surely be registered as a sex offender if he were alive today) fortunately only wrote two Alice books, which therefore means that, strictly speaking, there can’t be a third film in this irksome series… or can there? Why not Alice Meets Beetlejuice? Alice Unplugged? The Return Of Alice: Alice With A Vengeance? Alice Goes To Centrelink? The possibilities are scarily endless!
I Wake Up Screening 