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Colorful and chaotic, "Alice Through the Looking Glass" is a mixed-up mess of origin stories, time-travel tropes and subdued silliness.
The story finds Alice (Mia Wasikowska), now the dashing captain of a merchant ship, being summoned through a mirror to return to Wonderland, where the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp) is ailing. He thinks his long-departed family is somehow still alive, and must get Alice to believe him and track their whereabouts.
Alice's only hope is to travel back in time, which means confronting the all-powerful Time (Sacha Baron Cohen) to steal the chronosphere, which controls past, present and future in Wonderland — where she learns about the Hatter's family, the Hightopps, and the beginnings of the rift between the royal sisters, the White Queen (Anne Hathaway) and the Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter).
Director James Bobin ("The Muppets") lightens the somber tone Tim Burton brought to the first "Alice" film with an appropriately psychedelic palette, but the script by Linda Woolverton (who wrote the first one) throws together plot elements and backstories into a topsy-turvy salad. Baron Cohen is impressive as the villain, but the movie belongs to Wasikowska, unfairly given third billing behind Depp and Hathaway, who turns Lewis Carroll's Alice into a swashbuckling action hero.
'Alice Through the Looking Glass'
Opens Friday, May 27, in theaters everywhere; rated PG for fantasy action/peril and some language; 113 minutes.