![]() So, screenwriter Linda Woolverton comes up with a torturous tale about the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp) needing Alice to rescue him from despondency over the loss of his family to another dastardly plot by the Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter). If falling down the rabbit hole was a good way to escape the ghastly Hamish (Leo Bill), pushing through the looking glass seems like simple avoidance. ![]() Here, Alice returns from the sea voyage to China on which she embarked at the end of the previous movie to discover that her former fiancé is ready to repossess her family home. Turns out that Burton's disinclination to direct this sequel was rather wise. Now, as director James Bobin ( The Muppets) takes over the franchise, the imagery hardens and the attempt to stuff the episodic Carroll into a three-act structure produces a narrative that is both complicated and unnecessary. Tim Burton's hallucinogenic reworking of Alice in Wonderland in 2010 may have been overwrought and noisy, but at least there was a certain whimsy to its crazed aesthetic and a certain logic to its feminist script, in which a 20-year-old Alice (Mia Wasikowska) must return to the dream world of her childhood to escape an enforced engagement to a domineering bore. It's a pleasing nod back to the source material (where the tea partiers were stuck at 6 o'clock) but this delicate moment is rare and hard-won in a film that otherwise seizes on Carroll's chronological metaphors and pounds away at them with CGI in one fist and revisionist storytelling in the other. ![]() Out of place that is, until he makes the dastardly decision to freeze the action at one minute before tea: There the Hatter, the dormouse and the March hare will sit in perpetuity without ever managing to eat or drink. ![]() True, the Hatter once boasted of a nodding acquaintance with Time – "…if you only kept on good terms with him, he'd do almost anything you liked with the clock," he says in the first of Lewis Carroll's classic children's books – but this big dark clown seems out of place at the pastoral party where the pocket watch gets dunked in the teacup. He's a towering figure, half-human, half-mechanical and played by the typecast Sacha Baron Cohen as another preposterous tyrant, this one measuring lifespans and marshalling seconds. In Disney's live-action sequel, Alice Through the Looking Glass, the Mad Hatter's tea party reconvenes – but now there's an unexpected guest.
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