When the above line of dialogue was spoken in the final third of baffling mess Malice In Wonderland (2009, no relation to the 1980s animated short), I knew I’d found my title.

Spoilers ahead!

I approached this weeks film with some trepidation. I felt sure it was going to be both bad and unpleasant. The optimism I had on Thursday- when I thought it would probably be inoffensive compared to the likes of Dark Crimes, was ebbing as I pushed the disc into my PS4. This was not helped by the fact that the privacy warnings- of the sort that begin every DVD- appeared to be blurry and out of focus. I navigated the flashy, if slightly insubstantial menu and pressed play.

What then followed was probably the oddest film I’ve ever seen- and I once watched Leprachaun 3,wherein Warwick Davis’ evil Leprechaun ends the film with a rap about how great he is. This is perhaps to be somewhat expected. Based (as you no doubt guessed) on the surreal and fantastical Lewis Carrol story of Alice in Wonderland, Malice in Wonderland (MIW hereafter) was always likely to be odd. But MIW isn’t just odd in the way its supposed to be, its general weirdness extends to almost every aspect of the film!

I won’t recap the whole plot here- largely because it makes very little sense. Suffice to say our protagonist Alice (Maggie Grace) is hit by secondary protagonist ‘Whitey’ (Danny Dyer)* in his cab and proceeds to lose her memory. They then pinball around London, meeting all manner of strange folk, all of whom are criminals, until she finally gets her memory back via the use of unnamed drugs, a magic, riddle-spouting radio DJ and time travel. I am not making this up. Using her regained memory, Alice and Whitey then proceed to find her long lost mother- the reason she came to London in the first place. Every single set piece, every single twist on the original Carrol story is a mixture of unpleasantness, sub-par Guy Ritchie-esque crime stuff, and strangeness that reaches the level of being nonsensical. I honestly cannot do justice to how goddamned strange, yet strangely boring this film is. If Guy Ritchie got beaned on the head by a large rock, taken to the hospital and doped up on morphine and then wrote a film… It would probably still be more competant than this.

But strangeness is okay; indeed strangeness is good! In a world of endless sequels, reboots and formulaic Hollywood crap, its good when a film can surprise you. Unfortunately this film’s approach to surprise was less like a birthday present and more like a mugging. The character motivations make no sense. Is Whitey selfish or does he care about Alice? Why is Alice in love with him- he has done almost nothing to earn it. He hit her with his freaking car! He literally spells out his intention to masturbate over the memory of her as one of the first thing he says to her! He’s approximately as lovable as an ulcer! As a side-effect of her amnesia, we are given basically no reason to care about Alice**, so the heavy lifting needs to be done by other characters. They’d have been better of making Whitey slightly less Danny Dyer and slightly more… I dunno…. Nice? What’s more the characters (with the exception of Alice) are ALL dialled up to 11. To be an enjoyably surreal ride, you need breathing room, moments of quiet; MIW assaults the viewer with:

-A gang of theives, one of whom has the eyes of a rat and a snout-like nose, whose base is a fairground ride.

-An information broker dressed as a Victorian (maybe Edwardian?) Duchess who has a magic brain hat.

-A white man with dreadlocks and a jamaican accent who speaks only in rhyme (and his companion, a rhyming prostitute)

-A DIFFERENT set of prostitutes whose base of operation is a cafe with numerous 18-wheelers parked outside, in which they have sex with the clients.

-A mob boss who speaks eloquently, carries an antique pistol and whose right hand man is an elderly man with an Axe called ‘Rex’.

-Time travel via the medium of the aforementioned magic DJ who speaks in riddles and can also appears to know all of Alice’s past?

It. Is. Breathless. It almost seems like the filmakers thought ‘if we whallop the viewer with batshit nonsense for the entire run-time, they might not notice that none of this makes any damn sense, a lot of it is outright offensive, and the CGI is totally amateurish’.

Perhaps oddest of all though is the ending. For the last ten minutes of the film, it tries to morph into a Normal Story where Normal Things happen. Alice and Whitey find out her mother sold Alice as a Baby, and now lives as a homeless women in the London Underground rail network. Alice meets her mum, is not even a little angry, her mum refuses the offer of a hotel room and a hot meal, and heartwarming music swells to play us out. The tonal shift could easily give you a neck injury.

I don’t have much more to say really! To be fair to MIW, every now and again the onslaught of fantasy-cockney one-liners does land, and Maggie Grace/ Danny Dyer are fine in their respective roles. But any good ideas are buried in a tide of astounding drek; perhaps it would have helped if the DVD had come with a bag of whatever the hell drugs they were taking when they made this?

1 star!: *

*Whitey like the rabbit. Geddit?

** A problem which, to a much lesser degree, affected Marvel’s Captain Marvel too.