Tim Burton’s misadventures in Wonderland are woefully miscalculated. Unlike Alice, who chased her dream down the rabbit-hole, the director seems to have stumbled into it. His Alice (Mia Wasikowska) is a hole in the screen—an A-hole, to be precise. In this conception of Lewis Carroll’s 19th-century whimsies, the ingenue has been aged to the brink of adulthood. She’s an ahead-of-her-time feminist (obvi!) corseted by Victorian England, and the twitty, orange-haired scion (Leo Bill) of her late father’s business associate expects her to be his bride. But she follows that wascally wabbit to Wonderland where, prophecy dictates, she’s to slay the Jabberwocky and save the kingdom. Alice, underwhelmed by the prospect, shrugs it off; she assumes she’s mired in an unusually heavy sleep, so she floats through the whacked-out scenery like a lucid dreamer awaiting her alarm clock. Following an undefined change of heart, she saves the Mad Hatter’s head (whole body played by Johnny Depp) from the oft-used chopping block of the Red Queen (whose head is Helena Bonham Carter’s and hair is Queen Elizabeth I’s). Alice rescues him dutifully, but continues to insist that he doesn’t exist. She may be liberated enough to ditch her bustle, but she wears her arid patrician heart on her sleeve.

The screenwriter, Linda Woolverton, cobbled together Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, but the hybrid hasn’t been plotted out; it’s a pastiche. One may not be sure why Alice is afraid to face a dragon that she thinks is imaginary, or whether the Red Queen’s vizier (Crispin Glover) recognizes Wonderland’s Most Wanted. (When he corners Alice in the corridor is he on to her or coming on to her?) Carroll didn’t let narrative get in the way of his paradoxes, which he structured like algorithms or derivatives—flawlessly meaningless. In this new Alice in Wonderland, paradoxes push the narrative forward. It moves full-steam ahead without having anywhere to go, even when a scene is worth loitering over. Burton maintains the suspense only sparingly—as when Alice sneaks about the cage of a toothy mongrel, prompting the gooiest cinematic lick since Gozu. But, on the whole, this movie would’ve flunked calculus—and its driving test, too.

In some ways, however, this adaptation is Wicked: The Mad Hatter has become Dorothy’s dimwitted Scarecrow. Even beneath a Lady Gaga pancake—and Mountain Dew-daubed irises the size of manholes—Depp grimaces better than anyone else in Hollywood. He gives the picture a much-needed emotional core. No longer burnished into terseness, as he was in Public Enemies, Depp is back in weirdo mode. He playfully backhands the Carroll-tinged dialogue, but his Hatter is a sad clown rather than a mad one—and Depp’s Chaplinesque proficiency makes Alice’s disregard all the more painful. Even in the original book, she wasn’t a particularly endearing character; she was the arbiter of the Age of Reason. But you can’t make her foil lovable if you don’t provide someone to love him. Dorothy’s teary departure from Oz might be a little mawkish for modern tastes, but when Alice says farewell to her friends, she may as well be flipping them the bird. In a coda as implausible as anything in Wonderland, she promptly rejects her beau, tells off the aristocracy, and woos her would-be father-in-law into making her a venture capitalist. She has all the P.R. charm of a Martha Stewart when she announces her intent to open trade routes to China. What will she trade? Let me guess—opium? Despite the ominous, oblong production design, a skirmish between Reds and Whites worthy of Tolkien and Eisenstein, and some snappy surrealist repartee, I was through with this looking-glass long before the brat set sail. If she only had a heart…

Recently, Burton’s imagination has fizzled when applied to the intellectual properties of others—even though Sleepy Hollow is a Halloween treat, and Batman Returns one of my franchise-film favorites. His Sweeney Todd was messy, too, and when Depp moonwalks in Alice, I flashed back to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory—a bad trip. Maybe, to me, a superheated mess like The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus is preferable because it was an iteration of the filmmaker’s mind; the squiggly story-line seemed to mean something to Terry Gilliam, even if the audience felt it was on the wrong side of his imaginarium. Where the Wild Things Are was a little sleepy—if not hollow; Spike Jonze clearly loved the material. His vernal warmth would’ve melted this icicle Alice. But Burton’s large-scale, Disney-financed perennial seems chilled by frantic labor and compromise. The mash-up will probably leave children feeling blue. It’s not the world-soul melancholy that the (somewhat creepily) death-aware Coraline left one with; Alice will merely jumble kids’ sympathies. Burton directs the way the White Queen (a surprisingly spunky—and surprisingly platinum—Anne Hathaway) concocts a magic elixir: with a pinch of underhanded wit, but as jittery as if there was a gun pointed at her head.