There was a point, and it wasn't that long ago, that Tim Burton and Johnny Depp equalled quality.
Edward Scissorhands, Sleepy Hollow, even Sweeny Todd. Spooky, gothic fables that showed visionary directorial flair and engaging performance alike.
The two seemed to work as a team, or perhaps even Depp was Burton's muse, drawing the best of the director.
In more recent times, however, we've had to suffer through leaden, turgid crap like the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory remake. And now the pair have turned their attentions to a reimagined version of Lewis Carrol's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through The Looking Glass.
They needn't have bothered.
The Alice tale has been done before. Much of what we know to be Alice in Wonderland comes from the somewhat filtered Disney adaptation from 50 years ago, rather than the books themselves. And this version, which picks over the concepts from the books, films and stage versions, then grinds them up and tries to recreate something from the dusty remains through a Return to Oz shaped sieve, offers very little.
Its one clever conceit is to reposition Alice's age from young girl to teenager on the verge of womanhood and emerging into Victorian society, where the pressure of an arranged marriage and societal mores place more pressure on her already troubled psyche. Here her visit to Underland (no, that's deliberate) is posited as a return, rather than an arrival, by everyone except Alice herself.
The world she arrives into bears scant resemblance to the nonsensical one created by Carroll, instead resorting to typical Burton-esque gothic tropes around which a basic quest narrative has been built. Burton himself said he wanted to restructure the tale since he found the original book to be just a collection of random events, apparently missing entirely the point.
And he's directing with a concrete touch. WIth heavy CGI and greenscreen, plus the need to make the film 3D, the reality is distorted further - not by the effects, but because of the effects. Some work subtly - Helena Bonham Carter's massive heid, for example - but many others fail spectacularly.
Crispin Glover, looking and sounding remarkably like Neil Stuke while playing the Knave of Hearts, is supposed to be 7ft tall, so has been digitally stretched and his head recomposited onto this elongated body. The resulting effect is jerky, jarring (watch when he gets on and off his horse at the Tea Party, for example) and looks too much like a special effect to work.
He's not helped by some godawful acting. Mia Wasikowska is balsawood in a blue dress, while Depp reaches new levels of Jack Sparrowness as the Hatter, who goes between Scottish and Mockney quicker than David Tennant. There's one moment between the Hatter and Alice that's wonderful to watch, when you get a glimpse of the idea he suffers from multiple personality disorder, but it's blown out of your grasp before you can react, swept away in a new tide of gurning and dancing.
And that's the biggest problem with Alice. It's not, by any stretch, a bad film. It's just bland. On IMAX it utterly fails to blow you away visually, and lacks any subtlety to engage the viewer on an emotional level. It's just there. A painting by numbers exercise by Burton and Depp.
Perhaps the most charitable thing you can say about Alice in Wonderland is that it's a great pension top-up for British character actors of a certain age. Burton's anglophile nature means we get everyone from Christopher Lee to Frances De la Tour popping up at some point, either in the background or on voice duties. Who'd have thought you'd get Peggy Mitchell voicing a character in a Disney blockbuster?
