Mr. Movie: ‘Alice Through the Looking Glass’ a mirror image of the first film, but not as good

Mia Wasikowska reprises her role as Alice in Alice Through the Looking Glass. Johnny Depp returns as the Mad Hatter and Helena Bonham-Carter and Anne Hathaway are the Red and White queens.

New to the cast is Sasha Baron Cohen as Time.

Alice is now a ship captain. She returns to port to find that she no longer owns her ship and that her former beau is a snobby lord. Frustrated and nearly in tears, Alice is led to a mirror, where she falls through and learns her best bud the Mad Hatter is depressed to the point of death. He thinks his long-dead family is still alive. So Alice sneaks into the universal clock that runs time, tricks Time and steals the heart of time, the Chronosphere. She uses it to travel through time’s seas to keep Hatter’s family from being killed.

Most of the cast from Tim Burton’s 2010 version of Alice in Wonderland returns for the sequel. Burton — who produces — does not return as the director. That task is turned over to James Bobin, who directed the two recent Muppet movies.

He’s competent and pretty much copies Burton’s original. The effects in this one are stunning, and Bobin uses them liberally. But with a plot as thin as that provided by original film writer Linda Woolverton’s anemic script, he’s pretty much forced to overuse them.

In 3-D or 2, this is paint-by-numbers Disney. And like this week’s other blockbuster, X-Men: Apocalypse, Alice is missing an important key ingredient. Fun.

This story was originally published May 26, 2016 at 1:04 PM with the headline "Mr. Movie: ‘Alice Through the Looking Glass’ a mirror image of the first film, but not as good."