Maybe it's time for Burton and Depp to find themselves new friends.

Rating: 2/10 (6 March 2010)

Watching Tim Burton's ALICE IN WONDERLAND was a lackluster experience, and stands for now as probably the most charmless film the director's made. Plotted as a semi-sequel to the original story, Alice (Mia Wasikowska) returns several years after her first visit down the rabbit-hole to Wonderland where she meets up with plenty of adventurous creatures who remembers her. Sadly, Wonderland is all scattered between the Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter lending her voice and her face on a huge animated head) and the White Queen (Anne Hathaway), and Alice is the only one able to get things right by dueling the Red Queen's vicious dragon Jabberwocky. Out of all the creatures Alice encounters (and at a certain time it feels like there's too many to handle), none of them are especially funny or amusing, and the film falls fatally when the plot turns page after page and gets rhythmically less and less interesting before it finishes with a incredibly dull climax. There's no further interest in character than fine costume and make-up (or in most cases, mediocre animations), and ironically on the occasion that the Mad Hatter's (Johnny Depp) past is revealed, it ruins his loony and screwy characteristics by humanizing him. I watched it in terrible and irritating 3D (this will be the last time), and were given a neat surprise when removing the 3D-glasses to find the entire screen blurry and off-colored, which seemed closer to author Lewis Carroll's hallucinatory vision than Tim Burton ever got.