Review: ALICE THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS

ALICE THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS
(FANTASY/ADVENTURE)
1.5 out of 4 stars 
Directed by James Bobin
Starring: Mia Wasikowska, Johnny Depp, Sacha Baron Cohen, Helena Bonham Carter, Anne Hathaway, Rhys Ifans, Lindsay Duncan, Ed Speelers, Matt Lucas, Stephen Fry (voice), Michael Sheen (voice), Timothy Spall (voice), Barbara Windsor (voice), Matt Vogel (voice)
Rated PG for fantasy action/peril and some language.
113 minutes
Verdict: Alice loses her muchness and filmmakers their nerve in this featherweight and thoroughly diluted cash-grab of a sequel.
YOU MAY BE INTERESTED IN ALICE THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS IF YOU LIKED:
ALICE IN WONDERLAND  (2010)
OZ THE GREAT AND POWERFUL  (2013)
MALEFICENT  (2014)
INTO THE WOODS  (2014)
RETURN TO OZ  (1985)
It appears as though Alice has lost her muchness again.
ALICE THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS weirdly feels like a sequel that no one asked for, and yet, the first movie grossed a billion dollars worldwide, so of course it was inevitable.  In a way, it's like a mini test run for one of those Avatar sequels James Cameron keeps talking about; a sequel for a visual effects-driven movie that was explosively successful in the brief 3D boom, but one that doesn't exactly draw glowing opinions in the aftermath.  When Tim Burton's ALICE IN WONDERLAND opened in theaters six years ago, I was still in high school, and I was wholeheartedly excited for it.  It was at the height of my Disney mania, Johnny Depp was my favorite actor (THE TOURIST was certainly disappointing in 2009, but that must have been an isolated misstep) and Tim Burton was around the top of the list of my favorite filmmakers.  ALICE was the movie was shattered the illusion for me.  The visual effects were splendid, but even as I actively tried to convince myself that I liked it, the characters were so thinly drawn, the plot was a formulaic Chronicles of Narnia rehash, and then there was Depp.  The man who had created one of the all-time great screen characters in Captain Jack Sparrow, in addition to numerous other wonderful, colorful characters, was up there in an aggressively over-designed costume and makeup, alternating between idiotic lisp and inexplicable Scottish brogue, and I began to have a really tough time justifying this with the creative genius I'd admired.  Near the end, when Depp's character of the Hatter finally performed the "Futterwacken", a computer-enhanced jig, the whole thing came crashing down, and I simply couldn't fool myself into liking what I was seeing.  THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS is not better.  In fact, it's a substantial step down.

Burton is producing this time, relinquishing the director's chair to MUPPETS MOST WANTED director James Bobin, and while some effort is made to replicate the first movie's distinctive, Oscar-winning aesthetic, the differences are palpable.  The film opens rather largely, with Alice (Mia Wasikowska) captaining her late father's ship in a tumultuous sea storm on the run from Chinese pirates in a weird scene that aims to present a boldly adventurous heroine but plays more than a little like a Pippi Longstocking story.  Returning from to London, Alice learns that her employer has died and the shipping company has passed on his boorish son (Ed Speelers), who intends to blackmail Alice into giving up her captaincy and taking a job as a clerk.  Faced with an impossible decision, Alice then re-encounters Absolem (voiced by the late, great Alan Rickman in his final role), the caterpillar-turned-butterfly who takes her through a mirror back into the absurd world of Underland, where her old friend Tarrant Hightopp (Johnny Depp), aka "The Mad Hatter", is not well.  Convinced that his family is still alive but missing, so Alice goes to see Time (Sacha Baron Cohen) to request the use of the time-traveling Chronosphere to go back and save the Hatter's family before they were killed, but another party has an interest in the Chronosphere, namely the badly-tempered Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter), who wants to reclaim the throne from her sister, the benevolent White Queen (Anne Hathaway).
Even for all it's copious faults, the first movie at least had a boldness to it, the sort that resulted in a tiny Alice trying to cross a castle moat full of much larger severed heads in the middle of a massive Disney production, which I absolutely have to admire, but all of that has been heavily watered down to make a substantially more family-friendly product, but a far duller one.  I couldn't help but think of the Hatter's line from the first one, "You've lost your muchness."  Whatever made this world special is gone, replaced by a surprisingly slight, childish serving of CGI that amounts to meaningless fluff.  Every character except Alice seems to be constantly on the periphery, and despite noble attempts to craft a proper feminist heroine, she's simply too bland to draw any interest.  Depp's Hatter is barely a plot point, and almost everyone is giving their best impression of a toddler.  The only genuine and yet underserved point of interest is Cohen's Time, a character who maybe isn't quite as funny as he's meant to be, but who's undoubtedly the least irritating of the Underland characters and plays a slightly more nuanced role, if only slightly.

It wouldn't be surprising to hear that Bobin and screenwriter Linda Woolverton (who also wrote the first one) drew inspiration from Disney's 1985 box office flop-turned-cult classic RETURN TO OZ, with one character, Time's mechanical manservant Wilkins, even bearing more than a passing resemblance to that movie's Tik-Tok, but lacks its potency.  The time-traveling aspect reminded me of the Rankin/Bass holiday special Here Comes Peter Cottontail than anything else.  It's so diluted and slight, it might as well be a TV special.  Visually, regardless of what you thought about its aggressive design, the first was undoubtedly a visual marvel, and while it's true that six years have passed and effects technology has advanced accordingly, everything about THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS looks passe in comparison to its predecessor.  There's nothing here that you haven't seen before, design or tech-wise.  No boundaries are pushed except to see how much money can be milked from a classic work of literary wit using as little wit as possible.

Images via Disney