It’s hard to think of a movie franchise that is less in tune with the spirit of the source material than Disney’s effects-bludgeoning, action onslaught adaptations of Lewis Carroll’s whimsical Alice stories. This sequel to Tim Burton’s megabucks first film has a new director – James Bobin takes over and Burton produces – but it refers more to Alice’s first big screen outing than it does to anything in Carroll’s books. Despite the fact that Alice (Mia Wasikowska) is now a sea captain who can escape pirate pursuers by stunt piloting a three-masted sailing ship over a sand bank, the forces of patriarchy in Victorian England are still out to oppress her.
As with the last film, Alice escapes to “Underland”, where she finds the Hatter (Johnny Depp, looking as though he fell head first into a Mac counter) in the grip of a morbid depression. To save him, she must steal the chronosphere from Time (Sacha Baron Cohen, responsible for the film’s funniest moments) and travel back to meddle with the past. A blitzkrieg of digital effects and a kind of HG Wells meets Hogwarts aesthetic is not enough to distract from the fact that the storytelling is all smoke and mirrors and very little in the way of heart.
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