Movie review: 'Alice in Wonderland' flawed but magical

Tim Burton’s bold reinterpretation of “Alice in Wonderland” is the closest approximation to an acid trip you’ll encounter without indulging. Brimming with hallucinogenic imagery and characters you’d swear were sipping LSD-laced tea, Burton’s 3-D opus is sure to take “Fantasia’s” place as a favorite among hard-core stoners.

The beauty of it, though, is that the just-say-no crowd will be no less intoxicated by Alice’s encounters with hookah-smoking caterpillars, eccentric monarchs and potions that literally make you high. And what’s not to love about a cast with Crispin Glover and Johnny Depp dueling for the title of most weird?

So far, so good, right? Well, sort of. Like Wonderland, or Underland, as it’s called here, there’s something nefarious at work beneath the glitzy surface, and that something is Linda Woolverton’s generic script.

I know it’s difficult to improve on something as perfect as Lewis Carroll’s Victorian novel about a young girl’s unexpected encounter with a bizzaro other world, but you’d expect something a little more fun and daring than what Woolverton has concocted.

Forgoing the heart that fueled her screenplays for “The Lion King” and “Beauty and the Beast,” Woolverton opts for a more mechanized, “Avatar”-type tone that too often leaves you cold, if not bored.

Luckily, Burton is around to pick up the slack with his endless imagination. He’s so grand at creating these fantastical environments that you forgive him for taking occasional liberties with Carroll’s tale, not the least of which the decision to recast Alice as an adolescent instead of a child.

She’s also a less passive Alice, one more willing to take command of her fate without sacrificing any of the wonder she experiences in encountering such unusual beings as the rotund twins, Tweedledee and Tweedledum, and Depp’s crazed Mad Hatter.

As played by newcomer Mia Wasikowska, it’s hard not to be smitten with Alice, I was dubious when I learned of Wasikowska (HBO’s “In Treatment”) being cast in the role, but she proves more than worthy just in the ease with which she holds her own opposite stellar actors like Depp, Anne Hathaway and Helena Bonham Carter.

You’d follow her anywhere and she gladly takes you everywhere imaginable in Underland, the magical world at the bottom of the rabbit hole Alice falls down while fleeing an engagement party at which she’s being unwillingly betrothed to a smug, annoying aristocrat.

We soon learn her tumble was no accident. She’s been led there by the White Rabbit (voiced by Michael Sheen) to slay the behemoth Jabborwocky and thus end the reign of Bohnam Carter’s scene-stealing evil Red Queen. But is she the right Alice?

It’s a question that follows her everywhere she travels in Underland, and frankly the constant questioning of whether she has the right stuff or not quickly grows tedious. She is THE Alice, after all, and we know that from the start. But the movie lets the questioning drag on well into the third act, which is capped by a climactic CGI-enhanced battle more befitting an “Avatar” or “The Lord of the Rings” than a children’s story.

Like most of the other scenes in this regrettably episodic tale, the final smack down is free of drama and surprise. It almost seems perfunctory, as if Burton felt the need to appease those youngsters who believe every movie should end with a battle to the death. It makes you appreciate more the smaller, subtler moments and characterizations that enable “Alice” to maintain its high enchantment level. And chief among those delights is Bonham Carter, hilarious as the megalomaniac monarch whose noggin has swelled to twice her body’s size. Now, that’s what I call a head case.

It’s also what I call a superior performance, as Bonham Carter rarely fails to elicit a laugh by playing off her character’s inflated ego and reciting the queen’s iconic demand, “off with their heads,” as if she really means it.

Only slightly less strong are Alan Rickman as the voice of the curmudgeonly caterpillar, Absolem; Glover as the Queen’s chief henchman, Stayne-Knave of Hearts; and Hathaway, as her less maniacal (and less colorful) younger sister, the White Queen.

More than the solid acting and the indelible characters, though, what lures you deep inside Burton’s strange new world is the inescapable feeling that you’re experiencing something truly magical and wondrous for the first time, just like Alice.

And believe me, it’s a powerful feeling that is just too rare not to fully appreciate, flaws and all.

Reach Al Alexander at aalexander@ledger.com.

ALICE IN WONDERLAND (PG) Cast includes Mia Wasikowska, Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter and Crispin Glover. Directed by Tim Burton. 2 stars out of 4.