Six years after her first encounter with the creatures from "Wonderland", the feisty young "Alice" (Mia Wasikowska) finds herself outmanoeuvred by her scheming ex "Hamish" (Leo Bill) and disappointed with her mother (Lindsay Duncan) so a bit at a loss! What's left to do but follow a bug through a mirror above the fireplace back into a realm where she quickly discovers that the "Mad Hatter" (Johnny Depp) is in a bad way. He's missing his family who have long since died, and so she decides to get hold of a time-travel enabling "Chronosphere" and go back in time to retro-fix this disaster. Of course it's not going to be a simple operation, especially as the two royal sisters "Iracebeth" (Helena Bonham Carter) and "Mirana" (Anne Hathaway) are at loggerheads after their father (Richard Armitage) decided to opt for his younger daughter to succeed him. To be fair, the irascible "Irecebeth" might not have been his best choice - but she's not taking this lying down, and soon their magical kingdom is rife with strife. Can the ingenious "Alice" manage to fix things? It's not really the strongest of stories, this one, and with Depp largely side-lined (or bed-ridden) it's left to the CGI to do most of the storytelling. It does look great this - à la "The Golden Compass" (2007), with loads of stunning visuals and imagination let loose, but the plot vacillates between the adventure and the sentimental all too weakly. Wasikowska turns in quite an amiable effort and HBC does try to imbue her character with a bit of tea-time menace, but neither really have enough to work with as the sibling rivalry elements are distinctly an rather predictably undercooked. It's all perfectly watchable on a big screen - colourful and lively, but it's just too "Alice Goes to Narnia".
