By Christopher Kelly
McClatchy Newspapers

Like a screeching toddler on a Skittles bender, Tim Burton's “Alice in Wonderland” rants and raves, sputters and squeals, working itself into pure frenzy. The only possible reaction is to stare at the screen in dismay and wonder if this movie has an “Off” switch.

All of the Burton trademarks are here, though more and more lately they play more like insufferable tics: the fussily art-directed images; the cartoonishly ghoulish Danny Elfman score; the “Look ma, I'm a weirdo” Johnny Depp performance. What is missing are the same things that were missing from other recent Burton pictures, including “Sweeney Todd” (2007) and “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” (2005). Deeper emotions. Larger purpose. A sense of control over the material.

Working from a screenplay by Linda Woolverton, who doesn't so much adapt Lewis Carroll's classic children's books — “Alice's Adventures in Wonderland” and “Through the Looking Glass” — as strenuously riff upon them, “Alice in Wonderland” opens with 19-year-old Alice (Mia Wasikowska, bland and boring) attending a party where a sniveling young man (Leo Bill) is about to ask for her hand in marriage.

Terrified by the prospect of such a potentially bloodless future (in case you miss the point, Burton scrubs the screen of any bursts of color), Alice instead spies a rabbit nervously bouncing around the estate grounds and chases him down a hole. She finds herself, a la Carroll's novel, in a strange room featuring tiny doors that she can't fit through. But she also finds herself the subject of much gossip among the creatures she encounters: Is this the Alice, they ask, who visited their wonderland many years ago?

The decision to set this story a decade or so after “Through the Looking Glass” — while at the same time replaying some of the novel's most famous episodes — feels calculated and inexplicable. Calculated because Burton and Woolverton have taken Carroll's blissfully illogical story and tamed it. This “Alice in Wonderland” is an all-too-logical and familiar tale of young female empowerment. Alice must take up arms against the evil Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter, with a tiny body and a giant head, shouting at the top of her lungs) to restore power to the kindly White Queen (Anne Hathaway, looking befuddled).

But didn't the filmmakers realize the trap they were creating for themselves? A wall-to-wall parade of talking, computer-generated animals (including the hookah-smoking blue caterpillar, voiced by Alan Rickman, and the evaporating Cheshire cat, voiced by Stephen Fry)? Mythological mumbo-jumbo about a sword that can slay the deadly Jabberwocky? Forget about Lewis Carroll — it's the poor man's version of “The Chronicles of Narnia.” With its frequent references to past events, it's also plainly confusing — like a sequel to a movie that was never made.

In his best works, chiefly “Edward Scissorhands” (1990) and “Ed Wood” (1994), Burton is able to temper the pop-gothic frenzy with a measure of calm and melancholy. No such luck here. “Alice in Wonderland” more closely resembles the wind-up-toy chaos of his dismal “Planet of the Apes” remake (2001): Stuff keeps happening in every corner of the frame, yet we have no idea why. As Alice grows in size and shrinks and then grows again — and as Burton tries to exploit the 3-D technology — we lose any sense of physical scale of the characters. In a number of sequences, the actors are curiously posed together but don't entirely appear to be in the same frame.

As for Depp, he turns up in a flaming orange wig, wearing chalk-pale makeup and giant green contact lenses. He is billed as the star, though his Mad Hatter has little to do with the actual plot.

Presumably he is also supposed to be funny, but his presence is just unnerving; he plays the character like a cross between Willy Wonka and John Wayne Gacy. Watching him preen through the film, you get the sense of an actor spinning entirely in his own orbit, amusing solely himself.

It's self-indulgence run amok, which — come to think of it — is a good way to describe the entire movie.