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Malice in WonderlandMalice in Wonderland is an off the wall re-imagining of Lewis Carroll's seminal tale transported to modern day London, Southend and Great Yarmouth. Rather than tumbling down the rabbit hole, Alice is hit by a cab and whilst suffering from amnesia (and the side effects of some particularly potent tranquilisers provided by her new found knight with The Knowledge) she's ferried around a seedy and surreal criminal underbelly by her fast-talking and time-pressed cabby, "Whitey", played by Danny Dyer.
In a noticeably low-budget project, Dyer is the film's most recognisable player and despite recent claims that he wants to move away from the type of cockneyfied hard-man roles into which he has been typecast; Malice In Wonderland does little to remind you of the performances that once had critics and even the late great Harold Pinter crowing about his talent as he started out on the West End stage. It speaks volumes that Dyer's appearance here is elevated to an almost Brando-esque status by comparison to a supporting cast of faintly recognisable faces including Peep Show's Matt 'Super Hans' King, who plays a slightly less believable Super Hans; Paul Kaye who's inexplicably a rhyming Rastafarian and Lost's Maggie Grace, who phones in her performance as Alice.
The cast, like the film's premise, are hampered by a script that's got all the subtlety of a televised hen night. When it's not making ham-fisted attempts to reference Lewis Carroll's source material, the movie plays heavily on the type of Laaaaahndon geezer dialect that you'd expect to find scrawled on the back of Guy Ritchie's "currant bun". Despite its faults, for fleeting moments the movie is both visually striking and enjoyably bizarre, although all too often positioning the camera at a jaunty angle is mistaken for a surreal perspective leading you to spend much of Malice In Wonderland's 90 minute duration wondering whether a broken tripod is responsible for your skewed view of proceedings.
What disappoints the most is that in Malice there are undoubted glimmers of potential that simply get lost in the slurry of confusion and tired East End convention. There's no doubt that director Simon Fellows and writer Jayson Rothwell are furnished with some intriguing ideas and it would've been interesting to see what impact a more expansive budget and a clearer vision of the concept could have had on their re-imagined tumble down the rabbit hole. Dyer too is at times engaging but such moments are all too transient in a film that overall is high on ideal but falls short when it comes to delivery.
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