Burton serves up another disappointment

MOVIE REVIEW

Alice In Wonderland
DIRECTED BY: Tim Burton STARRING: Mia Wasikowska, Johnny Depp, Crispen Glover, Helena Bonham Carter, Anne Hathaway
CERT: PG

Tim Burton has been living off past glories for a long time now. He’s never lost that fierce imagination or the visual flair, and he’s clearly still looking at the world through a unique pair of eyes, but in recent years his films have been showing annoying signs of laziness and self-indulgence.
And though they’ve boasted their moments of wonder, the likes of Sweeney Todd and Charlie And The Chocolate Factory have been lacking that old touch of genius, that special something that would have lifted them above the ordinary or indeed, above that terrible state of being different and quirky simply for the sake of it.
Burton’s long-anticipated Alice In Wonderland falls into the same category. And in all fairness, it was really never going to be the kind of project that would get the man back on track for the simple reason that Lewis Carroll’s even more fierce imagination gives Burton way too many excuses to lose the run of himself and up the dreaded quirky factor to a zillion.
What we didn’t foresee was that in doing so, he would make such a bland and disposable movie.
It kicks off with plenty of promise, though. In a wise move, Alice (Wasikowska) is all grown up here, a moody, independent-minded young woman of 19 whose adventures in Wonderland are now a distant childhood memory.
To her horror, Alice learns that her mother (Lindsay Duncan) has arranged for her to marry a sappy young aristocrat. But when he pops the question at a lavish engagement party, Alice takes a moment to think – before promptly disappearing down a hole after a rabbit.
She finds herself in a strange and beautiful world – one she may not know but which audiences will instantly recognise as Pandora (Wonderland was designed by Robert Stromberg, the man behind the lush jungles of Avatar).
To further that particular illusion, our old friend Absolem the Caterpillar (Alan Rickman) is blue. And then a crazy marine sergeant comes charging out of nowhere screaming, “Die! Die, you blue monkey freaks!”
Or maybe that’s when I nodded off for the first time.
Anyway, Alice is soon acquainted with the rest of the bizarre old gang – obnoxious twins Tweedledum and Tweedledee (Matt Lucas), the creepy Cheshire Cat (Stephen Fry), the wild March Hare (Paul Whitehouse), the incessantly screeching Dormouse (Barbara Windsor), Bayard the dog (Timothy Spall), Jabberwocky (Christopher Lee), and of course, the saucer-eyed Mad Hatter (Depp) – looking like a catastrophic cross between Madonna and Noddy from Slade.
She also crosses the paths of the Wonderland monarchs – the White Queen (Hathaway), who takes a shine to the girl, and the giant-skulled Red Queen (Bonham Carter), who has a thing for random beheadings, but wants to know if this is THE Alice before sending her to her fate.
The film does have a fair few moments and visually it is often stunning, though Burton does drop even that ball at crucial times and he fails to use the 3D gimmick to any genuinely worthwhile effect.
But mostly, Alice In Wonderland is a loud, garish mess that will probably baffle most kids and wreck the heads of their misfortunate parents or worse still, leave them bored and restless.
As if they recognised this, the suits at Disney seem to have insisted on the lame ending – a standard, big action, crowd-pleaser set piece that could have been lifted straight from any number of blockbuster fantasy adventure yarns. It is certainly not a Burton touch.
What saves the film from being completely pointless is a lovely performance by young Mia Wasikowska, who showed what she was made of in the television drama In Treatment and follows up on that promise in some style. And she gets some decent, and occasionally funny, support from the likes of Fry and Spall and Crispin Glover, who turns up as the Knave of Hearts.
Her more illustrious co-star Johnny Depp is simply being Johnny Depp, which is entertaining only to a point. Like his director (with whom he and Mr Burton’s lady friend Helena Bonham Carter have worked perhaps one too many times at this stage), Depp could do with taking his tired old schick in a whole new direction.