I had done this on the last few films. In a hurrah for equality, Alice runs away from the imposing Hamish Ascott, who she famously rejected in the previous film, and takes a leap through a looking glass revealed to her by Absolem the butterfly (voiced by the late Alan Rickman). Burton’s gone, replaced by James Bobin (“The Muppets”, “Muppets Most Wanted”), who retains the acid-trip look and feel of the film. But, with Burton stepping aside, new director James Bobin arrives with a hatful of pleasing ideas. The only way Alice can save him is to travel back and change the past – which rather annoys the officious Time.
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Cohen will be seen essaying role of Time.
If that sounds a like a fun premise, I can assure you the execution is not.
Mia Wasikowska is back as Alice, now a ship’s captain eager to vanquish pirates. If you have not been keeping track, the first X-Men and its two sequels were set in the current time period and then X-Men: First Class was set in the 1960’s, X-Men: Days of Future Past bounced between the 1970’s and present day and X-Men: Apocalypse is set in the 1980’s, completing the second trilogy.
The movie has a few amusing exchanges and attractive qualities, but it’s quickly a tiresome bore of an experience that has me dreading what the “live action” results of “Beauty and the Beast” may be like. There she learns that the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp) has fallen into a deep depression because no one but him believes that his family is still alive.
BEVERLY HILLS -The tea can wait, because it’s Alice’s turn to save the Hatter. Hathaway’s White Queen is equally uninspired. The action in it simply doesn’t match. The muddled script by Woolverton has Alice stealing a time-travel device to focus on the Red Queen’s (Helena Bonham Carter) origin more than Hatter’s woes. Trippy to think that the original Alice in Wonderland was first made into a movie over 100 years ago, in 1903! None of the scenes have any dramatic effect to match the visual grandeur.
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Based on the books by Lewis Carroll, Looking Glass brings back the stylized gang, including Johnny Depp as a freshly forlorn Mad Hatter, Helena Bonham Carter as the easily enraged Red Queen, the White Rabbit (Michael Sheen), the Cheshire Cat (Stephen Fry) and the rotund Tweedles (Matt Lucas). Now he’s failing, depressed and taken to bed because he doesn’t know what really happened to them. She is enjoyable to watch and her story is touching. But despite this impressive pedigree, the film seems to lack heart and you don’t care as much for the characters as you should. He’s also sort-of-romancing the still-shrieking Iracebeth or Red Queen, who’s again portrayed with great villainous glee by a strikingly-FXed and massively-headed Helena Bonham Carter, and her short scenes with Cohen are the funniest here, before the filmmakers do not forget to get back to all that irritatingly goofy and gooey plotting.
