Alice Through the Looking Glass review 2016 Disney Film

Not everyone will agree with the late Alan Rickman when, as the caterpillar in the new 2016 Disney film Alice Through the Looking Glass he says: 'You've been gone too long Alice.'

It's been four years since the 2010 Tim Burton Alice in Wonderland came out to a disappointing collection of two- and three-star reviews in the nationals. Poor Alice has not been much missed by the critics.

Reviewers be damned, however. The film earned over $1 billion a the international box office – and so now it's back, another live-action remake of a Disney classic alongside Cinderella, Maleficent and the forthcoming Beauty and the Beast and The Jungle Book.

Returning to the fluorescent, surreal landscape of Wonderland – or 'underland' as they call it – Alice and her weird and wonderful friends decide to risk the whole existence of humanity to save the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp) and his family by turning back the hands of time.

With the feel of a 90s video game, headstrong Alice jumps between the 'real' world of Victorian England where her mother wants to sell the boat Alice captains to her cretinous ex-fiancé, and the insane world of 'underland', where the Hatter is fading away with the mysterious disappearance of his family. Alice is given a series of incomprehensible missions that she must complete to get to the next level of incomprehensible missions, increasingly making everything worse as she strives to make everything better.

Just as dark and brooding as Tim Burton's previous imagining, Wonderland is inhabited once again by the complete starry cast that includes Mia Wasikowska, Johnny Depp, Anne Hathaway, Helena Bonham Carter and the voice of Barbara Windsor – and new arrivals Rhys Ifans and Sacha Baron Cohen (playing Time).

The CGI dream-scape is as transportive and vibrant as you would hope to find in a Tim Burton film. But unquestionably the thing that saves the day is Baron Cohen and his comic timing. The film is really only worth watching when he is on camera. Unfortunately, Baron Cohen's job is to regularly reminds the audience of how precious and fleeting time is, and how you shouldn't waste a single second of it – which feels like a mistake during two hours of the rambling, nonsensical plot in Alice.