A shoddy cast on top of a lazy script.

Rating: Null/10 (5 October 2016)

Just another soul-less CGI orgy directed with no apparent effort. All flash but no charm. It's as if a bored computer directed this boring mess – right after a very confused human with silly hair cast it. HAL-9000 already ruined one important space mission. Perhaps ruining a dumb movie pales by comparison, but it was still unnecessary.
I cannot say enough bad things about the cast, the movie's glaring weakness. Wiakowska is as bland and average-looking as they come. Of all the pretty, charming girls out there looking to jump-start a movie career Burton couldn't find anyone better than THAT? You kidding me? (But what's to expect from a guy who marries a garden dwarf called Helena Bonham Carter. Taste in beauty?) Her line-delivery comes off as subdued and listless. She'd be ideal to play a young female accountant in some lame-ass drama that nobody really wants to see, but to cast her in a fantasy comedy – as the title character no less – shows extraordinary incompetence on the part of the film-makers. Burton either picks great actors for his roles or the worst; he doesn't seem to cater to the mid-quality range.
But Burton's casting screw-ups don't end there. Hiring Crispin Glover as anything other than a bizarre nerd is bringing optimism to absurd new levels. (Actually, hiring him – period – is pretty daft.) The man can't act! The industry had tried already to turn him into some kind of a cult-status mini-legend, kind of like Ron Howard's brother, and that might have worked with the more easy-to-please zombies, I mean viewers, but to me he will always be a dull nepotist with very limited abilities/range and low on charisma. To cast him as a VILLAIN, no less, means that Burton had been sniffing not just glue, not just Bolivian mushrooms while making this movie, but perhaps he'd even been sniffing the rabbit's poo marbles too.
You know what they say in show-biz circles: "marry Tim Burton and you shall never have to kneel for roles again". Helena Bonham Carter, the overrated British "royal" (her grandfather was Prime Minister! Her parents were in the movie industry in high positions, and there are all sorts of genetically exhausted lords and baronesses there too), married out of interest just as her "royal" ancestors had on numerous occasions, and much as Alice was supposed to. (The irony.) Don't you hate directors who ALWAYS have to stick their wives/girlfriends/mistresses into their films? It reeks of unprofessionalism, not to mention that it makes Burton look like a mug who let's wifey wear the pants. Helena's pathetic turn as an unfunny evil queen instantly reminded me of Miranda Richardson's funny portrayal of Queen Elizabeth in "Blackadder", or an inferior and idiotic imitation of it, to be precise. If Burton blew snot out of his nose watching his wife play this character, then he must be even more impressionable and easy-to-please than teeny-bopper fans of One Direction.
How about Anne Hathaway? She's supposed to be the movie's star beauty. We've always known that Burton's aesthetic sense was bizarre, in a good way - because many of his movies got a great look as a result of it, but it's a double-edged sword, isn't it. He may know what a creature or a castle should look like, but that also translates in a very deranged, skewered, warped taste in women. As if Hathaway didn't have a mouth already big enough to swallow a yawning hippo, he gave her a TON of lipstick which gives the impression that Anne only has a mouth. And that it's bigger than Stephen Fry's cat's mouth.
Speaking of which, the Cheshire cat is supposed to be one of the stars of the story, but instead had been turned into a minor annoyance due to Fry's uninteresting, self-important, non-funny, stupid voice.
The only good move Burton made was casting Depp, who is fairly interesting. But even he struggles to keep our interest due to the shoddy script that amounts to not much more than a very stereotypical good-vs-evil plot that contains zero excitement – unless you're 5 years old. (In which case you anyway shouldn't be watching this coz Hathaway's huge mouth gave the movie an R rating.) Alan Rickman gets a tiny voice-over while Glover gets a key role! Burton Tim, shouldn't Rickman have played the villain? Anyone with half a brain would have cast Rickman as the Queen's henchman instead of that little nepotist Glover who obliterates that role.
The first 30 minutes are half-way watchable, but this CGI opera then quickly deteriorates, due to shoddy casting choices, but also because the plot is so abysmally boring. The gags also fail, and they just keep failing. There are maybe 2-3 instances when something funny or amusing is being said.
And then, just to make sure we know how much he hates his audiences, Burton ends the movie with the tender hysterical yelping of one called Avril Lavigne. Did someone lobotomize Burton? No, wait: that's the result of working for Hollywood for such a long period of time. Anyone in his shoes ends up lobotomized. Must be something about the air in California.