Review of Alice Through the Looking Glass (2016) by Jeff B — 04 Jul 2016

Ah, the Wonderland years! Offering more of the same Mad Hat Tricks, Alice's continuing Adventures take audiences Through the Looking Glass and into a resplendent but redundant second helping. Looks great, less filling...that's the better tagline for this, an unnecessary sequel to Disney's billion-dollar C.S. Lewis adaptation. Granted, Lewis wrote a sequel and the first flick minted enough money to unfreeze Uncle Walt's cryogenically frozen head back into service, but the trippy Alice in Wonderland wasn't actually good enough to warrant a filmic follow-up. It was more of an excuse for visionary filmmaker Tim Burton to play with and utilize the newly re-discovered gimmick of 3D. Still, said sequel amazingly fails to fall into a sophomore slump. It proves way more visually than intellectually sumptuous, but so did the first one. Also, it's story resembles the actual source material very little, but the first one had the same limitations...albeit Alice in Wonderland was slightly more faithful. What Alice Through the Looking Glass succeeds at, however, is in incorporating the colorful renderings of the characters from the first flick with an intriguing new character in Time (a fastidious German-accented muckety muck played memorably by Sacha Baron Cohen) while keeping the proceedings lively enough to keep moviegoers vested.

In this PG-rated sequel, Alice (Mia Wasikowska) returns to the whimsical world of Wonderland and travels back in time to save the Mad Hatter (Depp).

A few sequences (particularly, Time's pint-sized Second automatons, which form much bigger minutes and even monstrous hours) even best the original's better moments. For the most part, the cast merely stands and delivers, not imbuing their characters with great vitality. Why should they? Most of them come courtesy of CGI, save for Mia Wasikowska, who gamely delivers the goods. A make-up-drenched and creepy Johnny Depp, meanwhile, proves more cringe-worthy than worth caring about. David Bobin did the Muppets a great service in helming their last two movies and makes a serviceable entry into blockbusterdom here, but he still seems to work better with puppets than A-List actors in need of some direction.

Bottom line: Tweedle Deuce.