"Alice in Wonderland" ** (out of four): The most wondrous thing about director Tim Burton's take on the Lewis Carroll classic is how lacking in wonder it all is.

Tim Burton, Johnny Depp, "Alice in Wonderland". Yep, I'd see that. Who better to bring to life Lewis Carroll's classic fairytale - about a girl who famously falls through a rabbit hole into a skewed world of disappearing cats, smoking caterpillars and mad hatters - than the director of "Edward Scissorhands", "Sweeney Todd" and "The Nightmare Before Christmas". And who better to play the aforementioned haberdasher than the man who has partnered with Mr. Burton to create some of the more memorably zany characters of the last twenty years (the ill-conceived Willy Wonka collaboration excluded, of course). It turns out that this umpteenth version of "Alice" (the imdb.com list requires scrolling) does not equal the sum of its parts. In fact, the most wondrous thing about it is how lacking in wonder it all is.

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