His Two Cents: Yet another offering from director Tim Burton based upon material from another source (don’t you long for the far-off days of the wildly original Edward Scissorhands and Beetle Juice?), this is also one of his most flawed and frustrating, falling prey to the irksome notion that a fabulous star cast, major money and lots of technology (plus 3D innovations) will unfailingly create something brilliant. Cherry-picking beloved figures and situations from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland and Through The Looking Glass, we watch the improbably free-thinking and now-19-year-old Alice (Aussie Mia Wasikowska), escaping a marriage proposal and again falling down a rabbit burrow, banging her head and entering the realms of apparent fantasy, although this time there’s darker trouble afoot as a slightly Wizard Of Oz-tinged struggle between good and evil is afoot between the glam White Queen (Anne Hathaway) and the bizarrely-stunted and large-headed Red Queen (Burton’s offscreen partner Helena Bonham Carter, spiritedly stealing it). The Red Queen has control of the Jabberwock, the Bandersnatch and the Jubjub Bird and is preparing for a battle set to take place on the Frabjous Day, while the noble denizens of Wonderland (including Johnny Depp’s oddly unimpressive ginger-Scots Mad Hatter, Matt Lucas’ FX Tweedledum and Tweedledee, the Stephen Fry-voiced Cheshire Cat and many others) are counting on Alice to help them, even if, in a rather tiresome but very Burtonesque conceit, she’s so estranged from her childhood dreams and fancies she initially can’t work out if she’s dreaming or (in a safely Disney fashion) losing it.
Although the original Alice stories are certainly episodic and stop-start (meaning that the many previous filmings have sprawled all over the place), this director’s shot takes too many liberties with the source, and wastes so much time making the Mad Hatter, the Tweedles and all the rest something more than mere caricatures (which they are) that everything winds up feeling lethargic and over-cluttered. And while the cast is undoubtedly amazing (other voicers include Timothy Spall, Alan Rickman and Barbara Windsor, just for starters), almost none of them are quite as amusing, grotesque or, ahem, three-dimensional as they really should be. And small Wonder.

Mad Dog

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