In six years, you may have forgotten how bad Tim Burton’s mega-blockbuster Alice in Wonderland (It made over $1 billion globally!) was. The visually innovative fantasy was a narrative disaster that could not decide if the protagonist was Mia Wasikowska’s Alice or Johnny Depp’s carrot-topped Mad Hatter. Shockingly, the sequel, Alice Through the Looking Glass, lost Burton yet is an improvement. Mind you, improving on awful is not much of an improvement, but it is growth.
Alice returns to Wonderland and finds Depp’s Hatter not just mad but dying. The flaxen-haired heroine must abuse Time (Sacha Baron Cohen, a smart new resident of Wonderland) to save the Hatter’s family. Most of the first movie’s performers return, but no one stands out as much as Depp, Cohen and Helena Bonham Carter as the villainous Queen of Hearts. I would not recommend this second trip down the rabbit hole, but at least it is better than the first.
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