Availing herself of an early DeLorean prototype called the Chronosphere, Alice (played again by Mia Wasikowska) goes careening back and forth through time, embarking on a frenzied quest to save her friend the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp) by plumbing his messy family history and correcting the mistakes of the past. In Disney’s crass, pointless sequel to its similarly crass, pointless “Alice in Wonderland” (2010), our heroine doesn’t just tumble down a rabbit hole or step through a magic mirror. We can still lose ourselves in the extraordinary “unpossible” of Lewis’ imagination - but Looking‘s story, and our emotional engagement, stay behind the glass.“Alice Through the Looking Glass” is a movie for anyone who ever skimmed a passage of Lewis Carroll and thought, “This is great, but it could use a bit more ‘Terminator.’” It may just be that despite the epicness of Alice’s quest, the stakes feel low because the outcome itself never seems in question of course loved ones will be reunited and good will ultimately triumph over evil, even in Wonderland’s topsy-turvy world. And the film is a feast to look at, even if it sometimes feel like you’ll get gout in your eyeballs from the overwhelming CGI lushness of it all. We get small doses of most of the novel’s most beloved characters, too: our White Rabbit and grinning Cat and the Tweedles Dee and Dum. (She hates because she hurts.) She and Baron Cohen both have some great lines, though Wasikowska, our supposed heroine, isn’t allowed to do much more than furrow her brow prettily and play a very 21st century take on 19th-century pluck. It’s not the actors’ fault: Depp grimaces and prances in his mad Scottish-kabuki drag, Hathaway flutters like a glittery sparrow, and Bonham Carter brings bite and pathos to her Red Queen. That’s more than enough intrigue for 108 minutes, but the movie feels oddly static and more than a little airless. (Though he does cast Da G himself, Sacha Baron Cohen, in a major supporting role as Time personified.) For better or worse, Looking Glass loses none of the first film’s muchness, with Bobin mimicking both his predecessor’s wildly saturated style and his general disregard for plot and substance. Burton is billed as a producer on the sequel, but now he’s passed the directing reins to James Bobin ( Da Ali G Show, Flight of the Concords, both recent big-screen Muppets reboots). And in some ways he was: The film grossed a staggering $1 billion worldwide and won two Oscars (for Art Direction and Costume Design), though some critics felt there was too little actual wonder beneath all its brain-whomping visual dazzle. It sounds like one of the Cheshire Cat’s slippery riddles: What is a Tim Burton movie with no Tim Burton in it? The Mad Hatter-haired fantasist seemed like a perfectly surreal match for 2010’s Alice in Wonderland, the umpteenth cinematic adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s curiouser-and-curiouser classic.
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