A major disappointment

Rating: 4/10 (4 October 2004)

John Malkovich being Lewis Carroll!. Remember through the looking glass and down the rabbit hole? And all the strange situations Alice got into, like rooms with low ceilings? But this film lacks the charm of the literary classic written in the 19th century. In fact, it is a deplorable mess. I am a Malkovich fan. He has done some of the finest work in theatre and film of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. But this is a major misstep. The puppets (really marionettes) with all their actions being controlled by someone else pulling the strings are supposed to be some sort of analogy for what happens to the real people--with someone else yanking them around. But I wish we could have seen more of them--the marionettes, that is. And I thought the pet orangutan was good also.