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Tuesday, March 19, 2024
March 19, 2024

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‘Looking Glass’ a humdrum trip back to Wonderland

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When Tim Burton’s 2010 live-action version of “Alice in Wonderland” raked in a billion dollars there was no question that Disney would pounce on the opportunity for a sequel. Helpfully, Lewis Carroll did write a second book about Alice and her adventures in Wonderland, “Through the Looking-Glass,” but it proves to be only a suggestion for the film to a very diminished return. It feels reverse-engineered to fit a release date, with a story that, though it takes wild liberties with the book’s plot, manages to feel largely unimaginative and low stakes.

These films have grown Alice up into a young lady, played by Mia Wasikowska. The real world framing device places Alice in a business quandary with the Ascot family. She’s been off captaining ships in China, but finds herself, her house, and her ship subject to their business whims, and they expect her to conform to a more appropriate career for a lady. So she escapes through a mirror to the magical alternate universe where her friends the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp) and the White Queen (Anne Hathaway) share a wary co-existence with the Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter).

Writer Linda Woolverton and director James Bobin have cooked up a problem for Alice to solve there, though it relegates many characters to the background. Hatter, who thought his family long dead, has reason to believe they might still be alive, and the realization has thrown him into a deep depression. To save her friend, Alice goes back in time via a steampunk time-travel orb that she steals from Time himself (Sacha Baron Cohen), skittering around in a sea of days to find the Hatter family.

It’s a weak premise, and weak execution, especially because the stakes go from entirely too low (cheering up her friend) to entirely too high (if she keeps the time travel orb out too long, time will stop and the entire universe will end). It’s never convincing why Alice, knowing the risks, would continue to use the orb for this task.

In the first film, Depp’s take on the Mad Hatter became a culturally ubiquitous phenomenon, a fact that becomes curiouser and curiouser when you realize that Depp is essentially doing a clownish drag performance of Helena Bonham Carter — who is already in this movie doing something like drag herself (the Red Queen’s eye makeup has shades of the late, great Divine from “Pink Flamingos”). On top of that, Baron Cohen’s performance as Time is just a Christoph Waltz impression stuffed inside one of Lady Gaga’s rejected costumes, and the less said about Hathaway’s overly affected and distracting hand acting, the better.

The premise is so thin that it wears out its welcome before the first act is up, and not even the visuals can save it.

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