Drowsier and drowsier...

Rating: 3/10 (12 March 2010)

..Is precisely what I felt after half an hour into this movie. One inevitably goes to watch the Burton-Depp pair expecting some cinematic magic. Instead what reigns on screen is sheer tedium. Oh yeah the plot.No one seemed to have been curious about that unimportant detail called the script.
Uhh..hmm..you know Alice is now 19 and by virtue of it she seems to have a perennially confused, wooden look on her face. And of course she will become the unwilling warrior destined to save Wonderland from the Red Queen and the monster she unleashes. And in the process she will make up her mind about marrying a moronic lord and rebel against..yawn..conservative society. Oh, are you even interested any more? And yes there's Johhny Depp too. I mean, the Mad Hatter. Doesn't make a difference. The bloke doesn't seem to be too important anyway.
Mr.Burton where is the magic? The wide eyed child's splendor that comes from the Lewis Carroll's characters? Here, as flimsy as 2D cardboard cutouts. Your wonderland looks drop dead gorgeous of course. But nothing that one cant experience from a modern day video game. Mia Wasikowska seems utterly lost and too inexperienced to fit into Alice's miniature shoes. Anne Hathway's White Queen comes across looking slightly cuckoo and dumb. The Red Queen is nothing you haven't seen Helena Bonham Carter do before. Johhny Depp's character is so poorly written that I expected him to evaporate off the screen midway instead of the Cheshire cat. The set design and imagery gets all the detail right. But trippy? Not by a mile. Picturesque? Yes. Magical? No.
A shoddily written fantasy soup, lukewarm and bread crumbs gone soggy. Given the novel it is based on, the movie lacks the most important ingredient. Soul. And all the 3D in the world can't save it.