This is a tipping point movie. Through some pretty good work on some pretty good films, Tim Burton and Johnny Depp were able to build a deep reservoir of goodwill that saw them through some less-than-spectacular collaborations.  But this film is more than a misfire.  Here they’ve crossed a line into a bizarre (not in a good way) and boring self-parody that will will leave moviegoers not waiting for a redemptive next effort but hoping these guys never hook up again.

To be fair, many of this movie’s problems stem not from actor or director but the script.  As banal as it would have been to watch a live-action rehash of the old animated Disney version, screenwriter Linda Woolverton managed to cook up something much worse.  The original movie follows Alice as she wanders through a weird world and meets a bunch of interesting characters. It’s not billed as a sequel, but the Burton film posits a 20-year-old Alice who visits Wonderland for a second time. Yes, she runs into all of her old pals, but this time instead of being aimless and entertaining and subversive, they’re all trying to recruit Alice to save the day in a great impending battle.   So instead of working through a scary but splendid maze, Alice is burdened by a strange hero’s journey artifice that seems meant to evoke “Harry Potter” or “Lord of the Rings.”  There’s a jabberwocky and a mythic sword and a rival queen to the Red Queen and a talking dog and a formulaic final battle scene that doesn’t thrill like its supposed to, or make much sense.

So how much blame does Burton deserve? A lot, actually. Instead of delivering with creepy and spectacular visuals, he fills the screen with a bunch of strange stuff that serves no purpose.  It’s all weird for the sake of weird. Not to turn this into a CGI rant, but he goes a little crazy with the technology, distorting the faces and bodies of the human actors for no reason. Crispin Glover’s frame is digitally stretched out to make him extra lanky.  Why?  Helena Bonham Carter’s Red Queen is the only source of any human emotion at all, but even the little of interest here is destroyed thanks to a digitally enlarged head.  It’s as if the CGI is purposely used to deaden the performances and make the characters less believable.

As for Depp, there’s just not much to say, but there should be.  His name is selling the movie as much as anything else, and its the type of role he seems cut out for.  But we’ve seen it all before. His Mad Hatter is predictably kooky, vaguely Scottish, and completely uninteresting.  Yes, he’s augmented with an untouching backstory, but it’s never clear who or what he’s supposed to be.  Here’s a spoiler alert (an alert of a couple of things that really spoiled the movie): in the last act the Mad Hatter somehow becomes a skilled swordsman and then shows off his moves in one of the most baffling dance sequences in movie history (Turbo and the broom from “Breakin’” included).

In total, “Alice” plays like a thrown together film made by a couple of hacks who asked themselves, “If Burton and Depp were doing this, what would it be like?”