Go Back to Wonderland

Alan Rickman's voice may be the best thing about the new "Alice Through the Looking Glass."

By John Locanthi

May 25, 2016 6:16AM PDT

Critic's Grade: D

Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass is a classic, the birthplace of some of our favorite characters in Disney's animated Alice in Wonderland, like the Walrus and the Carpenter, and some who didn't make the cut, like the Jabberwock.

Unfortunately for Alice Through the Looking Glass, the Jabberwock died in the first film of this live-action series. What you're left with this is a tale of time travel and daddy issues where the only connection to the source material is that Alice walks through a mirror.

Johnny Depp's quirky Mad Hatter is sad. He found a hat, you see. A hat he made for his dad. And so it's up to Alice (Mia Wasikowska), who exists solely is to solve all of Wonderland's problems, to travel back in time and find out what happened to Hatter's dad.

Director James Bobin has turned down the quirk from Tim Burton's atrocious prequel—viewers are mercifully spared another Johnny Depp dance number—but the basic problems remain.

Alice is a bland action hero. Helena Bonham Carter's Red Queen is ear-piercingly obnoxious. Depp's Mad Hatter just plain sucks. Time (Sacha Baron Cohen, with a thick German accent) provides an occasional laugh here and there, but they're surrounded by a mess of lame attempts at wit, faux profundity and unearned emotional resolutions.

It's bad, and everyone involved should feel bad.

Rated PG.

Sacha Baron Cohen, Pink, Johnny Depp, Mia Wasikowska, Anne Hathaway and Matt Lucas pose together at The US Premiere of Disney's "Alice Through the Looking Glass" at the El Capitan Theater in Los Angeles - photo from Disney — Sacha Baron Cohen, Pink, Johnny Depp, Mia Wasikowska, Anne Hathaway and Matt Lucas pose together at The US Premiere of Disney’s “Alice Through the Looking Glass” at the El Capitan Theater in Los Angeles – photo from Disney

Willamette Week

John Locanthi

Willamette Week's resident fashion icon and chest hair model, John Locanthi writes about fast food, pop culture, football, nanobubble-infused water, copyright law and whatever else the paper will pay him to write about. This University of Oregon grad spends his spare time live-tweeting old movies and TV shows and otherwise living in the past. Also, he once won a health reporting award for a story about a llama.

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