A Burton-Depp Disappointment

Rating: 4/10 (5 September 2010)

Here we have yet another in the seemingly never-ending Tim Burton-Johnny Depp partnerships. Unfortunately, here we do not have one of the stronger Tim Burton-Johnny Depp partnerships. "Alice in Wonderland" stands as a disappointment when all is said and done, in spite of the fact that it has a number of things going for it, not the least of which is - well - Burton and Depp. The movie lends itself to each in their classic styles. Depp gets to play another in his huge repertoire of unusual characters (in this case, he's the Mad Hatter) while re-creating Wonderland is a perfect match with Burton's quirky directorial style, and he does so with the typical Burton touch. Wonderland becomes a very dark and ominous place in this movie. In addition to these two main figures, there are pretty good performances from Helena Bonham Carter as the Red Queen ("off with his head!") and Mia Wasikowska was fine as a 20-year old Alice who's about to become engaged as the story begins (the movie is essentially an account of Alice re-visiting Wonderland.) I haven't seen much of Wasikowska's work. I can't say she blew me away in the role, but she also didn't drive me away! The animated effects were also pretty good.
The whole thing fails though at the basic but obviously vital level of story. It's quite frankly not all that interesting, and certainly much could have been done with the delightfully larger than life characters that Lewis Carroll created so long ago. While understanding, of course, that Alice is the title character, I thought Depp's Mad Hatter was unfortunately under-used for the most part. I also found the connections between Alice's almost-engagement at the beginning and end of the movie strangely disconnected from everything that happened in between. What was the need to have her almost engaged to Hamish? What purpose did that serve? What plot point did it advance? Perhaps, I suppose, that Alice needed to escape from an undesirable situation, and retreating to Wonderland allowed her to do that, but the connection was tenuous at best. I appreciated the obvious effort that everyone put into this, but the end result was still largely disappointing.