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D+When the Disney brass needed someone to replace Tim Burton as the director of Alice Through the Looking Glass, the sequel to their 2010 hit, Alice in Wonderland, they probably thought they made a safe choice in James Bobin, director of The Muppets. Unfortunately, they didn’t go far enough. They should have made Muppets Through the Looking Glass instead.
In Alice Through the Looking Glass, a now-adult Alice (Mia Wasikowska) returns to Wonderland by going through a mirror. There, the White Queen (Anne Hathaway) tells her that the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp) is in poor health, and that the only way to save him is to get an object called the Chronosphere from Time (Sacha Baron Cohen) and use it to travel into the past and rescue the Hatter’s family.
If Time and the Chronosphere seem more at home in the work of H.G. Wells rather than Lewis Carroll, there’s a reason. The plot of Looking Glass bears little resemblance to any of Carroll’s books, although other familiar characters like the Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter), the Cheshire Cat (voiced by Stephen Fry), and the White Rabbit (Michael Sheen) also appear. Instead, screenwriter Linda Woolverton throws in a bizarre time-travel storyline and a real world subplot involving Alice facing the loss of her family business. While either of these might have made an interesting story, combining them with 3D digital slapstick characters results in a confusing mess. DIrector Bobin and Woolverton seem unable to make up their minds whether the movie is a race-against-the-clock adventure or a silly comedy, and, as a result, Looking Glass really isn’t either. This indecision is most evident in the character of Time, who is alternately portrayed as a Borat-like buffoon, a straight villain, and a pathetic victim. Other characters fare little better. As a supposedly plucky heroine, Mia Wasikowska is reduced to playing straight woman to her overacting co-stars in too many scenes. Helena Bonham Carter has fun once again in her role, but Johnny Depp’s overacting wears thin very quickly here. Alice Through the Looking Glass is only a pale reflection of Carroll’s source material and Tim Burton’s far more striking original film.
In this scene, Johnny Depp and friends crack jokes at Sacha Baron Cohen’s expense. Our full review of Alice Through the Looking Glass will be posted on Silver Screen Cinema as soon as it is available.
Photo credit: “Johnny Depp” by Vanessa Lua / Flickr / CC BY-SA 2.0
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