Alice Through the Looking Glass

A rather ineffective followup to Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, Alice Through the Looking Glass follows Mia Wasikowska’s title character as she embarks on a perilous quest to prove that the Mad Hatter’s (Johnny Depp) family didn’t perish in a long-ago calamity. Filmmaker James Bobin delivers a strong opening stretch that seems to bode well for the ensuing narrative, as the director, working from a screenplay by Linda Woolverton, kicks the proceedings off with a briskly-paced and thoroughly entertaining first act – with the picture benefiting substantially from Wasikowska’s strong work as the affable, sympathetic protagonist. (Sacha Baron Cohen, cast as Time, offers as irreverent and oddball a performance as one might’ve anticipated, while Depp and his various Wonderland-based costars provide able periphery support as well.) It’s increasingly clear, however, that Bobin’s consistently (and aggressively) over-the-top sensibilities grow intolerable somewhere around the movie’s midway point, as the film, which has clearly been designed to appeal mostly (or is that solely?) to very small children, adopts a frenetic tone that’s amusing for a while but eventually becomes exhausting – with the atmosphere of sensory overload compounded and perpetuated by an egregious emphasis on computer-generated special effects. Bobin’s climactic attempts at tugging at the viewer’s heartstrings, as a result, fall completely and hopelessly flat, which ultimately confirms Alice Through the Looking Glass‘ place as an overblown and underwhelming sequel to a somewhat middling original.

** out of ****