Adult Alice Kingsleigh (Mia Wasikowska) is back in the chaotic, charmless Lewis Carroll theme-restaurant that Tim Burton invented a few years back, where she is less a hero in charge of her own life and more a pawn of forces outside her control. This time, Hatter (Johnny Depp) is out of sorts and needs her help, which she will offer because “Hatter is [her] truest friend.” We have no idea what Alice means by that—no one here approaches being a real character with plausible motivations—but this is the sort of movie that believes six impossible things because they’re in the script. Hoary time-travel clichés will be deployed as Alice steals a device from Time (Sacha Baron Cohen, channeling, for some reason, Werner Herzog) that threatens the fundamental soundness of the universe. But anything for a friend, right? It’s all a bit like a rejected script from
Doctor Who—and
Doctor Who has not been noted lately for rejecting much of anything.
Looking Glass wants to be about a lot of big emotion—family, devotion, friendship—but it does nothing to earn any of it.
By
MaryAnn Johanson