Film review: Alice Through the Looking Glass is a tired follow-up

Johnny Depp, left, and Mia Wasikowska in Alice Through the Looking Glass. Peter Mountain / Disney via AP Photo

Alice Through the Looking Glass

Director: James Bobin

Starring: Johnny Depp, Anne Hathaway, Mia Wasikowska

Two stars

Like its predecessor, Alice Through the Looking Glass owes very little to Lewis Carroll.

But lest you think that a six-year gap and the absence of Tim Burton from the director’s chair – he does contribute as a producer – might have allowed for a return to the gleeful absurdity of Carroll’s original works, it doesn’t.

Screenwriter Linda Woolverton has again dispensed with the source material in favour of something more linear – a story about Alice (Mia Wasikowska) looking for the family of the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp).

Director James Bobin’s film trudges through the lushly designed world answering questions we never asked, such as: What was the Mad Hatter’s childhood like? Why does the Red Queen have such a large head? In other words, it’s an origin story.

We meet Alice some years after the first film and, once again, real life is getting frustrating so she climbs through a mirror and is transported back to Underland. Her old friends, she discovers, have been waiting for her to return and fix another problem.

The nightmarish Hatter, who has developed a more pronounced – and annoying – lisp, is wallowing in life-­threatening depression because he has found an object that suggests his family is alive.

Alice decides be a noble friend and take on Time (Sacha Baron Cohen) to get to the bottom of what really happened on the day when the Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter) unleashed her Jabberwocky on their village. Time, you should know, is part clock, part man. His sequences, and little steampunk companions, are a high point of the film – the one time Bobin can get out from under Burton’s suffocating shadow.

Alice steals a time-travel device and careens back through time to try to correct the original sins of Underland – even after she learns of the possibly catastrophic consequences of her actions. While this might sound intriguing on paper, on screen it is less than enchanting and gets considerably less compelling as it goes on.

Aside from Depp’s descent into grating ghoulishness, the returning characters are mostly the same. Bonham Carter and Anne Hathaway (The White Queen) continue to do their scenery-chewing shticks, while the host of Underland creatures and their famous voices (including the late Alan Rickman) appear more dated than ever – beholden to Burton’s CGI renderings from six years ago.

Excitement and wonder are hard to conjure up when your Mad Hatter is consumed with daddy issues, your protagonist is nonchalant about everything and the oddities of this world are suddenly getting scientific explanations and backstories that really only show how awfully ordinary everything once was.

The Alice stories could be so wonderful on the big screen. It might be time to scrap it all and try again.

• Alice Through the Looking Glass is in cinemas now