Or 'The Return of Alice', as it should be titled, since what Burton offers on this outing is a 19-year-old Alice finding herself back in Wonderland with apparent amnesia regarding her first visit, which facilitates going through more or less all the same scenes and characters. Then a bit of dragon-slaying is tacked on so that we get a heroic quest element too. I have a sneaking suspicion that Burton avoided a straight telling of the original book just so he could tweak the structure to give his family, i.e. Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham-Carter, more substantial parts as the Mad Hatter and Red Queen respectively. I suppose at least it made Disney happy, and to be fair repeatedly casting those two is a no-brainer in that it's a guarantee of at least two dependable turns. And just to be sure of pulling power, Burton's included such a galaxy of British thesps throwing in fleeting voiceovers for CGI beasties that reading the credits becomes quite revelatory. Why did they have Michael Sheen in to do ten lines of White Rabbit, for instance?
Ok, now to the actual film. Well, it could hardly be anyone else's work - it works a rich colour palette and contains the usual digs at the stolid adult world. The dialogue is the customary breakneck wordplay, and the fresh-faced unknown chosen for the lead puts up a good show.
But Burton has been treading water for a while now, and clearly 2007's
Sweeney Todd was a false dawn. For all the trademark spidery Burtonisms, this is a kiddie product designed to shift merchandising units. The Red Queen's castle even looks uncannily like the Magic Kingdom, almost as if Burton had slipped it in under the corporation's radar to reassure the loyals with a wink. One can only hope so, because the charm of the source material is swamped by the unnecessarily hyperactive CGI action on show, as if the objective was to compete with George Lucas, and I found myself longing for the 1951 animation instead. The one by a certain Disney corporation.
4/10
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