nice details, bland overall

Rating: 5/10 (14 March 2010)

Disney used to be wacky, in tune with its characters and with the child in all of us. This is so syrupy that my teeth hurt. What gets me most are the missed chances - practically every character relationship, Red Queen/Knave of Hearts, White Queen/Alice, Mad Hatter/everybody else, has glaringly obvious potentials which are just as glaringly obviously ignored. (The erotic potential one could not have even hoped for.) The result is a story with no force or forward movement whatsoever. The only reason I am giving it some points is that it is very nicely turned out in visual detail, and there are a few scenes which remind me of Disney before it drowned in its own zero-fat mayonnaise - most notably the tea at Mad Hatter's, which somehow escaped the board-room's attention to convey a few minutes of genuinely disjointed, out-of-control, disturbingly familiar shifted reality. I finally give it a pass because I was amused while it lasted, shallowly.