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 In cinemas Thursday [PG]
Director: Tim Burton
Runtime: 109mins
Tim Burton’s Alice isn’t a re-make but a sequel to Lewis Carroll’s beloved books, bringing a teenage Alice (Mia Wasikowska) back to Wonderland to repair the damage done in her absence by the Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter). Helping her out, while trying to convince her this isn’t all a repeat of a dream she had when she was younger, are characters like the Cheshire Cat (Stephen Fry), the Caterpillar (Alan Rickman) and, of course, the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp).
Depp is always charming playing these cartoonish fops, this time flip-flopping between a mad lisp and an enraged Scottish brogue as if he’s got multiple personalities. Carter plays the Red Queen as a big-headed homage to Miranda Richardson’s Queen of Hearts from the 1999 version, screeching, “Off with their heads!” constantly. The British character actors roped in to voice the CG cast do a lot of the heavy lifting – as well as the dependable Fry and Rickman there’s Paul Whitehouse from The Fast Show and Matt Lucas from Little Britain. Unfortunately, Wasikowska’s Alice doesn’t have the common-sense bossiness of the character from the books and so doesn’t rail against these mad characters.
As for the story, rather than another surreal picaresque ramble, a generic fantasy plot has been bolted on. You know the one – a chosen one has to fulfil a prophecy by finding a magic sword to kill a dragon with, thus restoring the rightful monarch – and it’s dutifully ticked off step by step here. Well, the dragon is called the Jabberwock, but otherwise it’s by the numbers. Everything in Wonderland, renamed Underland, has been given a name as well, and they’re the kind of sub-Harry Potter names that reinforce the resemblance to a knock-off fantasy novel with a map in the front. The drink that makes Alice shrink is called Pishsalver; the Red Queen lives in Salazen Grum; the Caterpillar’s named Absolem – none of them have the fairytale whimsy or linguistic playfulness of Lewis Carroll.
Visually it’s impressive of course, because it’s Tim Burton with a Disney budget. The Knave of Hearts is a bandy-limbed goth and Tweedledum and Tweedledee are rubber-faced goons. The 3D effects have clearly been tacked on to cash in on the fad, however, and neither add to the spectacle or enrich the backgrounds, which feel familiar. For a story about the triumph of the imagination, it isn’t quite imaginative enough.
**˝
JODY MACGREGOR
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