FILM REVIEW Alice In Wonderland

Don’t follow the white rabbit

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PG * 108 mins * 5 March
Director: Tim Burton
Cast: Johnny Depp, Mia Wasikowska, Anne Hathaway, Helena Bonham Carter, Crispin Glover

Maybe UK cinema chains were on to something when they threatened to boycott Tim Burton’s big-budget take on Lewis Carroll’s most famous works. Indeed, hindsight makes those worries about shrinking DVD release windows look like a cunning ruse to get out of screening a fantastical dud. It’s by some distance the director’s most disappointing outing since Planet Of The Apes.

Alice In Wonderland may look fantastic – even if the 3D comes across as disappointingly flat after Avatar’s immersive depth – but there’s little else going for it. A complete lack of story isn’t usually a problem for Burton, who’s always got away with putting style before substance, but chucking key characters and moments from Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland and Through The Looking Glass into a loose Return To Oz-type framework provides little sustenance for heart, brain or adrenal gland – it’s emotionally cold, utterly predictable and there’s never any sense of peril.

You don’t even care much about the now grown-up Alice going back down the rabbit hole some 13 years after her original adventure. To be fair, Aussie newcomer Mia Wasikowska copes fine when she’s playing a wide-eyed ingénue running away from an unsuitable fiancé. Once she arrives in a world of talking cats and hedgehog croquet, however, you never see anything to make you believe her evolution into world-saving ass-kicker capable of rescuing Underland from the clutches of the evil Red Queen (an excellent, big-headed Helena Bonham Carter, channelling Anne Robinson).

With the usually reliable Johnny Depp miscast as a Mad Hatter whose role is beefed up so much that he becomes a mixture of action hero and love interest – we know he’s Burton’s mate, but this is ridiculous – it’s the entirely digital characters who fare best. Realised in near-flawless CG, a perfectly cast gang of British thesps have a field day voicing Carroll’s familiar menagerie of animals and weirdos: best of the bunch are Matt Lucas’s bumbling Tweedledum and Tweedledee, Barbara Windsor’s swashbuckling Dormouse and Paul Whitehouse’s dangerously unhinged March Hare.

Ultimately, however, they’re underserved by a script whose narrative ideas rarely stretch beyond making Alice bigger and smaller, and the epic, good vs evil battle finale that’s become a fantasy cliché. Far from wondrous. Richard Edwards